Wear and Tear
by Laryna6
Summary: Contemplative oneshots. X4: Lifesaver, zombies, senility. X5: Drs., children, parts & replacing them. X6: X, humanity, deception. X7: Alia, androids, hot springs, age and other differences. X8: Zero, fate and fighting it. XCM: Axl, mavericks, caring.
1. What should not be

Several things: For some reason, this fic gives me a feeling of deja vu, that I've written something with the theme of Zero dreaming, and possibly even Lifesaver before.

This fic was supposed to be pure creepy, horror movie imagery and Lovecraft, that whole zombie thing that's all the rage nowadays, possibly ending on Zero's one actual word as a counterargument to that (or, really, proof that it wasn't even_ that_ simple and understandable, to quote ? from Mana Khemia, who gets fairly cosmic horrory himself), and then X just had to wake up. Why Ciel built Copy-X is very understandable, really, even if very stupid. Also why people didn't want to notice any of the discrepancies there must have been.

It was meant to be standalone, but ended up having themes in common with Wear and Tear, so I may even make that into a oneshot series.

Disclaimer: I don't own Megaman, X or otherwise, or anything referenced in this fic (Evil Dead franchise, for example). The rightful owners like Capcom do.

* * *

Zero dreams.

That isn't the thing that's unusual. Reploids are in some ways just as much replications of humans as they are of X. Humans dream for several reasons, and the reploid brain and the human brain are both computers. Both need to defragment, to put the day's events in perspective. To tell themselves stories in order to understand a very, very mad world.

A story that humans tell about dreams is that they come from two gates: one which sends false dreams, like going to school without the appropriate outerwear, and the other true dreams, of the future, present… and past.

In a sense, that's incorrect: all dreams are true, which is why a dreaming human will accept talking mushrooms as a perfectly normal thing instead of something that could never be real. It is real, or a reflection of reality. Some humans can become aware that this is a dream, and either watch the story unfold or change it to suit their liking.

Zero has nightmares.

Reploids don't. Reploids were created to be free from reprogramming, in control of their own minds. Most reploids will let the dreams their sleep-mode processor weaves proceed unhindered: it's something interesting to watch when they're too worried to shut off conscious function, and often newbuilts are afraid of being attacked and infected in their sleep capsules until they realize that there's such a thing as too paranoid. Often, they'll even allow scary things to happen in their dreams: there's something to be said for horror movies, after all, and it's a way to get past the fear of infection. To learn how to handle fear by experiencing it while they know they're safe. Which is why their mind creates those dreams in the first place.

Being trapped in a nightmare and watching a horror movie, even one starring yourself, are two very different things, however.

If Zero were a reploid, then he would know instantly that this dream isn't real. For one thing, the time on his internal clock doesn't match the timestamp in the dream. If he were a reploid, then he would know all these things happened years ago. It's over and done with. He wouldn't suffer the delusion that it's possible to change it, and it's just a waste of time to run through corridors, desperate to stop Final Weapon from being fired, or to fight his past self, facing a fanged smile dripping with blood, to kill him then and there and prevent Sigma from being taken, prevent all of this.

It makes his legs twitch in his sleep, and seeing that always made X think of a sleeping dog, legs moving as it chased tunnel rats in its dreams.

Lifesaver had never seen a dog (Maverick Hunter HQ handled its tunnel rats with the anti-infiltrator lasers in the air ducts), and to him, a doctor who is very familiar with how reploids work, seeing Zero move in his sleep is the stuff of nightmares. It's as unnatural as seeing a _corpse_ start to move, and that's both an incredibly disturbing metaphor and a strangely good description.

Reploids don't move unless they have consciously decided to. Zero's body is moving on its own, outside his conscious control. Like a zombie, shambling along even though the mind is gone.

Lifesaver's aware of the origin of the zombie myths, and frankly, in some ways, it's all too good a metaphor for something else.

Zero even woke up hungry for the blood of the living. Watched their fluids drip out avidly, on what little footage there is.

It makes him want a goddamn buster, when he's here alone for the night shift. Of course it isn't possible to arm a medic and he completely understands why. Medics are obvious targets for infection, since they have access to dormant reploids and so many chances for sabotage. Someday, he'll go maverick. He wouldn't have taken this job if he hadn't come to terms with that. When that happens, he'll be dead and someone with his body, his face, his memories, will be walking around trying to bring harm to his patients.

He isn't going to object to any policy that will make it easier for them to put him out of his misery. What happened with Dr. Doppler during the third war indicates that sometimes, the original personality is still in there, somewhere, in some form. X mentioned once that he finds this hopeful, a sign they can be brought out and cured, someday. It's one of the reasons Lifesaver considers X absolutely insane sometimes, really. Every hunter would rather die than go maverick, but to be trapped in your body while it moves around on its own, deceiving your loved ones and killing those you swore to protect?

No. It would be much better if the virus killed them. Or rather, put them out of their misery.

A maverick is, legally, a walking corpse. It makes it easier on everybody, and the hunters who go out there want to be treated that way if it happens to them. Wants the others not to hesitate, because they'll already be dead or screaming for it inside their heads.

Some hunters can't stand the old movies about zombie apocalypses. Others go so far as to read books about them, either as a survival guide, black humor, or both. Perhaps there's a feeling of relief in seeing them get defeated, cured, whatever, in seeing the good guys win. Lifesaver's decidedly in the first camp. He couldn't even sit through twenty minutes of this one where some of the zombies pretended they were still living people, the protagonist's friends.

Zero makes a soft sound in his throat. Lifesaver wouldn't have heard it if he hadn't been paranoid enough to turn his hearing up to max, and he wishes he hadn't. He's a defenseless medic. If Zero gets up out of that capsule, it's even odds that he'd even live long enough to sound the alarm.

He doesn't know how his predecessors stood this job. Of course, average life expectancy for a hunter chief medic is three months. He's far past that, which theoretically he should be glad of, but, frankly, day after day of that sword hanging over his neck, wondering when it will fall? Night after night of this? Perhaps they're lucky, not to last long enough that the waiting could drive them insane before the virus did.

It should be more reassuring that X is in the next capsule over, but that just makes the contrast worse. X sleeps like a proper reploid, a beautiful, peaceful statue. Of a saint, or a Buddha. A perfect angel, timeless and kind.

Some reploids are religious. Lifesaver's thankful that he had the scientific education to know better.

It's a relief, really.

What makes X's presence very much not a relief is that while he may look like an immortal, unchanging, touchstone, Zero is in far better condition than he is. They're both here because they took damage nipping a potential base for the next uprising in the bud, and he's here to keep an eye on them in case something goes wrong while they're sleeping.

In training simulations, and fighting Repliforce, X and Zero are equally matched. When the virus is involved, Zero always comes back in better shape than X does. It's not battle damage, but wear and tear. X's systems sometimes have to strain themselves, fighting off the virus, although it takes a concentration that would kill a normal reploid for him to even _notice_ it. Zero doesn't have that problem. If anything, it's the opposite.

X's systems are very different from a normal reploid's, since he is, after all, the great original, the only true android. He used to just stop by medical for energy refills, specific material formulas, and other things he needed to fix himself, but recently he's let Lifesaver assist with his repairs. Either he has some reason to think Lifesaver will be around longer than the others, so it's worth the time to teach him, or he's being a hopeful fool again.

Lifesaver would like to believe in him the way the rookies do, but he's been around too long. He's seen how many of the people X favors been maverick, how many times he's been betrayed. X is a trusting fool. He'd worry that X teaching him would make him a target if he weren't already a target.

X is incredibly powerful, incredibly designed, but he's only human, even if he is an android.

Sometimes, Lifesaver wonders if under the brave looks, under the kind smiles, this is wearing on X the way it is on him. Maybe he wasn't this dotty at the beginning, but night after night, war after war, would wear on anyone.

Hundreds of reploids have passed under Lifesaver's hands, and if X wasn't willfully blind, there's no way he could miss it.

X's systems are a masterwork, in the same way as the ancient stained glass window that had been in General's office. It is incredibly humbling to try to repair him, and realize that his clumsy efforts really couldn't do anything but detract from that elegant perfection. All he can do is try to convert the mess made by combat into one that can be repaired, and X heals fast. Incredibly fast.

This is what they should have been. The ideal. Dr. Light's ultimate creation, surpassing even the legendary Megaman.

Going from helping him, since X was the worse off, to checking over Zero?

Swirls of nanites, _swarms_ large enough to be visible without magnification. They might not know everything about how X worked, that century of hibernation had caused his system to optimize, surpass even Dr. Light's plans, but he _worked_.

Zero _shouldn't_.

Sure, he hadn't, theoretically. Not until he'd been brought in (by _Sigma!_) and fixed up by Dr. Cain and X. A mindless killing machine. But a well-oiled machine. Despite the fact that _it just didn't work like that_. Who had bare wires? Capacitors that practically seemed designed to crackle ominously? Perhaps the creeping, crawling… Perhaps the repair nanites were necessary to repair the damage his own systems did to themselves.

Whoever designed him must have been _mad_. He shouldn't be able to operate, let alone operate at combat levels, for a full minute without something breaking down! Something that shouldn't work, something that shouldn't be, and when he'd looked up at X with confusion in his eyes, because surely he must see something wrong with this, the older medic just smiled fondly.

"You can see why the virus might have trouble. Zero's immunity is probably because it's just not compatible with him. Practically nothing is, which poses several challenges," X had begun to lecture, the first time he'd asked for a hand.

Perhaps X was just used to reploids being flawed things, next to him? Or perhaps seeing so many misbuilt irregulars made Zero stand out less?

Or perhaps he was just being too kind, too trusting, as everyone kept saying, hunter and maverick alike?

They should be trying to keep him gullible, were they taunting him with what was right in front of his face?

Lifesaver shook his head. That was really all immaterial. He had to stay professional if he wanted anyone to listen to him. It was possible for reploids to have nervous breakdowns, and Alia was keeping an eye on him as it was. He had to find proof, not be ordered to take a vacation he'd likely never come back from, outside the 'security' of HQ.

And he definitely, definitely, must not look at the table over there and its array of surgical tools. They all had safety settings, sure (medics were not supposed to be armed), but they could be gotten around. X had actually shown him how to hack a couple of them, because otherwise they didn't register Zero as a reploid, and they were meant for surgery, not carpentry. The kind of precision they needed meant they burnt out quickly, and there was no use in using them on someone already dead or for Douglas' armor work, no matter _how _much of a hurry the mechanic was in. Douglas did not leave his armory unless it was an emergency, and no one except X (for Dr. Light's armors) was allowed in unless it was an emergency.

Lifesaver wished he had the luxury of taking precautions like that.

He could possibly manage to kill Zero. Possibly. Zero snapped awake instantly when an alarm went off, he'd seen that. He didn't need the couple seconds most did to boot up fully.

Could you kill something that was already dead?

No, that was nonsense. It was impossible to make rounds without coming across someone watching one of _those_ movies. The common areas, which he avoided, were almost as bad, but something about nearly dying tended to make hunters either especially morbid or in need of something to laugh at. Or both.

He was just being irrational. It was late, there was a betting pool on his life expectancy, and he wasn't the first to grasp at straws, hoping to find something out about the virus, hoping to find a cure. That was foolish. People got desperate, knowing their days were numbered, and then either they took one stupid risk too many in the hope they would find something and they would be saved, or Sigma took notice of them and took them out before they could get anywhere. Odd noises weren't going to help. At least there was no creaking in the eaves here, no windowpane for a branch to scratch at. Just the blinking of the screens full of various readouts, the occasional soft beep when something came up that he should take a look at but probably wasn't urgent, and Zero turning his head to the side, loose hair sliding down the side of the capsule.

Another murmur, unintelligible, and another, "Iris…"

This time, the soft sigh wasn't Zero's, as X managed to gracefully and silently get up and step out of his capsule. Most reploids couldn't do that without clanking against a side and waking up nearby people with hair-triggers, which was why the medic wing preferred that people signal an attendant (Lifesaver, at the moment) instead of getting up in the middle of the night if they wanted something.

Not that Lifesaver was going to quote medic regs at X: he'd probably helped write them, since he'd came here along with Dr. Cain.

He wondered if X had been awake all this time, or he'd set himself to wake up if Zero had a nightmare. It was the sort of thing X would do. His face was almost impassive as he looked down at his friend, concern showing in the tilt of his head and the way he was looking over Zero's body instead of the relative positions of his facial features, even though X had fine control over that as well. The air of a medic with a worrisome patient, and Lifesaver knew that X's eyes were on magnification, just checking to see if there were any outward signs.

Zero thrashed again, and this time X put his hand on Zero's head, to steady it, then picked up Zero's hair so that it wasn't falling outside the capsule. The sound X made wasn't a hum or a murmur, but it reminded him of the things human mothers did to soothe children. Zero moved one more time, and again, but just to end up in the normal sleeping position (getting comfortable?) before settling again.

"You probably shouldn't try that," X said quietly, stepping over to where Lifesaver sat. "It's better to wake him up from across the room if he has a nightmare. Or from behind some cover, when it's a bad one. He generally manages to realize that it wasn't real before he has the coordination to draw his beam saber, and he sleeps with his buster disabled, but he is the unarmed combat as well as beam saber instructor, after all. He managed to nearly take someone's arm off with a kicked chair once. Of course, we use flimsier furniture now."

'Back in my day…' those words brought that phrase to mind. "I can believe it." The Maverick/Irregular Zero hadn't used his buster unless someone tried to attack him from the air. "I've just been waiting it out when he gets like that." Maybe he should take the risk of being attacked, just to _make it stop_ sooner.

"He does need his sleep. His pseudo-REM rate relative to total downtime is slightly higher than a humans, although not as high as mine, and he needs a certain number of hours in order to debug. Compatibility problems, between his systems and what Dr. Cain and I installed," X explained.

"You have a higher REM rate?" He would have thought X had a shorter, more efficient one.

"At first, human scientists asked themselves why living creatures slept. In the end, the better question turned out to be, why did they wake up?" The corner of X's mouth turned up. "Of course, I did spend a century dreaming in that capsule. Perhaps I'm simply fond of sleep, but I do most of my best thinking in dreams. I suppose it's a good thing that Zero has to sleep, otherwise he'd skimp on it, and he needs it. He won't let himself think of these things while he's awake, and he needs to work through them."

Random philosophy at this hour? Or whatever X was on about. "If you're awake, would you mind keeping an eye on him while I make my rounds?" An excuse to get out of this room for longer than strictly necessary. X and Zero couldn't be left unattended for too long, not when they were the only immune ones (or at least one of them was…), but if X was watching Zero then he could get out of here, away from these thoughts.

"I'll come with you." X stood up again. "They probably wouldn't be foolish enough to tip their hand this early, if so, but I looked over your notes on exposure. Zero's unit's readings looked natural – he tries to soak up the virus with his own systems to keep it away from others – but while I hope I'm wrong, odds are that someone in my unit got exposed to a high amount. I will say something for these clumps – they give fair warning, and it's easier for a hunter to fight off an infection if they know it's happening, and I try to train them well, but _someone _should have wandered into a booby trap. And if they're trying to hide that they got hit with a large amount of virus, that could mean they're afraid they'd be summarily killed, after Repliforce, but it could also mean that it won."

"Readings on your two units look the same."

"Yes. That's not natural. I have to admit that sometimes, if there's something that my unit likely can't avoid I take the risk, but I don't push it the way Zero does. It would be too easy to get incapacitated. Because of that, Zero's unit is Special Operations. If he takes point, they can handle missions that otherwise couldn't be done. All it takes is one infected hunter to sound the alarm."

"He deliberately absorbs the virus." And X didn't see anything wrong with this picture.

"His nanites are very, very skilled at breaking anything they don't like down into raw materials. He can convert virus into system repair nanites, boost nanites, and of course repair materials. Back when we were the Irregular Hunters, we tried to use nanites to incapacitate irregulars. That unfortunately gave Zero the same power boost the virus does, before he was brought in. What I have to burn up resources to destroy, he's able to recycle. He's a very unique design."

"And no one knows anything about who built him?"

"No, other than the fact he was illegally built for combat. It's likely that whoever built him was his first victim, but by the time the area was secured and bodies were recovered, the trail had already gone cold. It's in his file," X reminded Lifesaver. "Everyone asks those questions, since he is immune, after all."

"Are you really sure that you don't know anything else?" Because X had to, unless he really was just that, that…

"I had a few thoughts, but they're unlikely to be right. Sigma appears to regard Zero's immunity as a personal frustration. Part of the point of Repliforce was likely to… Well."

"Care to share those theories?" Holding back information.

"No." X said it without rancor, but normally X went out of his way to be helpful. It was often hard to get him to _stop _talking. The fact he refused to even talk about it said quite a lot. "I do need to keep a few secrets, given the virus. Don't you need to go on your rounds? Zero will keep."

"Shouldn't you stay here?"

"Zero can look after himself. That's often the problem, actually."

Lifesaver agreed, given what Zero's ability to deal with the virus like that implied. He gave up, standing up and heading towards the door with a nod to X.

X watched him go, noticing without real surprise that Lifesaver was almost hurrying out instead of making one last check of Zero's, his patient's, status, and followed, closing the door behind them.

For awhile, the room stayed peaceful, the only sounds the quiet, steady beeps of the status updates still being sent to Lifesaver's station. Then, a long, steady, but still quiet beep – the warning of something not right.

X was the only one in that wing who would have been able to make the comparison to a human patient flatlining.

The beginning of that sound did announce that someone had died, but it was when the sound ended, as X's charged shot took out the maverick's thought processor in order to vaporize the virus with it, that their body stopped moving.


	2. What won't be

_And another random thing, because I have no control over what I write._

_This breaks a part of the _Wear and Tear _paradigm because it's not third person limited from an individuals pov. Of course, Alia's chapter ignores the 'injured Zero' part of the criteria by having a different injured blonde. Not to mention that Lifesaver's chapter has bits that are X's POV and then third person omniscient at the end. X's chapter breaks the pattern by being fundamentally upbeat: this is something that he's focused on solving despite the various signs he's fraying around the edges._

_This leaves X 1-3, 8, CM & the Xtremes. That means I could do an Iris POV, actually…_

_Disclaimer: I don't own Megaman, X or otherwise, in any of its variations. Capcom does. No infringement intended or money made._

* * *

Picture a room.

It would seem lab-like, between the white walls and countertops, the parts and devices scattered here and there, if it weren't for the fact that what wall space isn't taken up by doors, cabinets or bookshelves is adorned with various things ranging from a poster of Jimi Hendrix to a framed animation cel from _Astroboy_. It's clear that there used to be florescent track lighting, before it was ripped out with extreme prejudice and replaced with not just proper, non-headache-inducing incandescent bulbs, but incandescents on futuristic stainless-steel chandeliers, because the person doing the remodeling had felt like it.

The quote-a-day calendar is displaying a quote from Einstein, but it's about what happens when good men do nothing instead of relativity (not to mention the date's wrong), and one of the counters had held not an experiment but a half-completed extraordinarily complicated Gundam model kit until its owner moved it to the top of the minifridge to make room.

Picture a young man, maybe twenty-three. His hair is a light brown: nothing special, although a close examination might note that it's not as thick near the hairline as it is elsewhere. That might explain why he wears it longish and pulled back into a ponytail by a metal clip: he wants to enjoy his hair while he has it.

He's wearing a coat, and it is white, but that's where the resemblance to a doctor's coat ends. This is made of very heavy fabric, and the gloves he's wearing are leather, not rubber. They're not the kind of thing people wear to avoid infection or look impressive, they're the kind of thing people wear when they want something thick enough to protect them from sparks when they use the welder that's already out, lying on the recently-cleared counter, and black and brown are out of the question because they hide dirt and he'd end up tracking oil all over the house before he noticed anything. Something that will protect him from sharp-edged metal. The coat is clearly well-worn, with a few singes and cut threads here and there.

It's still immaculately clean, although that's probably about to change, given the supplies that are joining that welder on the table, pulled from cabinets and off shelves, in drawers and neatly stacked toolboxes, dug for under the sinks, behind the birdcage and out of the minifridge. Finally, he leans back against the counter and uses the edge of it to open the cold beer with practiced ease.

It's very clear that the man has a system, the kind of system that fits its originator like hand in glove , perfectly intuitive, and leaves other people wondering why there are paint samples stuck between the pages of a science fiction novel. The kind where the owner actually knows where everything is and would kill anyone who 'organized' the place, as opposed to the kind of 'system' that people have when they're just messy and don't want to admit it.

There are two worktables in the middle of the room, each with nearby counter space allocated to it. There's nothing on the other counter, in stark contrast to the almost homey clutter that occupies the rest of the room.

The man is looking at that counter as he takes a drink from his beer, not really paying attention to the taste, which is a shame since it looks like something from a microbrewery. He looks at the supplies he'd put on his counter, then at the empty one, and finally shrugs almost violently, putting his beer down on the counter and heading towards the door, muttering something that would have been easier to make out if it had been in one language instead of four. Despite the linguistic cacophony, irritation is conveyed quite well, as is the fact that that at least half of those words are probably profane, even though it's hard to pick out which specific ones to object to. That might be the idea. He checks to make sure that his gloves are on properly before he opens the door, seemingly from force of habit.

When he comes back there's a body slung over his shoulder. Well, half of one. He's carrying the other half in the crook of his other arm. They and the bag of miscellaneous swept-up parts get placed on the table carefully enough, even though it's clear that he'd prefer to throw them down on the table with enough force to make his displeasure clear, even if the cause of it isn't awake and won't remember a thing.

Despite the fact he's fairly skinny, he clearly had no trouble handling all that weight.

He's followed by a black-haired man, taller but maybe a year younger, who is trying to grow a beard. Perhaps he thinks it will make him look distinguished and wise beyond his years, although the fact there's already a few scattered grey hairs near his ears shows that will be taken care of soon enough. Unlike his companion he's large in a way that could be called big-boned. He's not exactly fat, but he's not exactly muscular, either, and it's fairly clear that he's going to be in trouble in a few years, once he's no longer a young man and his metabolism slows down.

He's also carrying a body, although at least this one is in one piece, aside from the scattered pieces he's also carrying in a bag. While the first man was businesslike about it, he puts his burden down slowly, trying to make sure that the boy would be comfortable if he was able to feel anything at all right then.

Now that the scene has been set, it would be remiss of the narrator not to tell you that absolutely none of it has anything to do with reality.

Well, except the near-dead bodies. Those are real enough.

"Thank you," the larger one says. "I had a capsule nearby, but it was armor, not life support." He'd switched most of his manufacturing capability over to armor. He would have had to bring the boy back to the capsule he'd woken up in, and he wasn't going to risk teleporting, not from in there. Not something so precious.

Not without the help of an expert, anyway.

"Children." The first man took a swig of his beer. "Fools, all of them. Can't live with them, can't build new ones. Modern parts are garbage and I need my reserves since this idiot keeps getting blown up every five seconds."

"Don't worry, I'll provide my own supplies." He was probably going to have to disassemble part of this capsule. Pity, he was trying to re-use them as much as possible. Precision parts didn't grow on trees, not in this era.

"You'll do no such thing. You built armors for my son, don't think I didn't notice your work and your feeble attempts to examine his systems. I refuse to owe you anything." Especially when, unlike him, the other man didn't have any means of replacing _anything_. The materials for those armors had come from a dwindling stock and they both knew it. Yet, even knowing that, he looked at him contemptuously over the top of the bottle. Seeing the other man's hesitation, he snorted. "If you don't trust my word, then why are you here?"

The man raised a black eyebrow at him. "I trust you with my own safety." Well, within reasonable limits, anyway. After all, death meant no more opportunities to gloat. "Can you blame me for not trusting you not to tamper with my children?" By, for example, kidnapping and trying to reprogram them. Or providing booby-trapped parts. "Nor do I trust your word." Hell no. "I've known you for too long."

His host laughed. "Maybe you aren't as dumb as you look. Sorry, but I didn't have the time for any elaborate plots. First this idiot boy rams himself into a space station and gets vaporized on re-entry. Fine, fine, I have a back-up body waiting and those idiot knockoffs will believe that he just survived if they know what's good for them."

"Apparently not all of them do." As this drama proved. Not that he resented that this had caused his son to nearly die or anything. "And technically they're not knockoffs. X made the technology public domain." Giving up an unbelievable amount of money for the sake of his children and the world. He was so proud of his boys sometimes that he could cry.

The other man just shrugged, picking up his beer again. Semantics. "And then, just a few hours later, when I haven't even gotten around to starting on another basic frame-"

"That what you get for wasting time calling me up and gloating at me." For _hours_. Still, he conceded the point and started trying to remember where the parts and tools he needed were.

"-the fool goes and lets himself get vivisected. Look at this mess!" Just when ultimate victory was within their grasp! Idiot kids!

"Oh? Surely the great Dr. Wily won't have trouble with such a little thing?" Thomas hoped not. X would be heartbroken.

"I wouldn't if it weren't for the fact that some of the parts he needs take months to make." In order to cut the time down he was going to have to possess a body and find a decent lab he could take over and that was always frustrating in this era where there was no such thing as a decent lab, not by his standards, anyway. So he had to waste yet more time building equipment from scratch so that he could use it to make the parts, and make sure that it was destroyed instead of falling into the hands of the hunters. He didn't want to be responsible for giving them what they needed to defeat the virus.

Well, not anymore than he already was, anyway.

Goddamn kids.

"Isoc, I think," he mused aloud.

That took what, five seconds to figure out? "Isoc? Isosceles. Acute. Smart. Wily. _Slightly_ more subtle than naming yourself Wisdom in French, but not by much. Why don't you just name yourself Yliw?"

"Oh, be quiet. It's not like they'll figure it out. 'Serges,' for heaven's sake. How could they mishear Sagasse as that?"

"I don't know. Maybe because no one speaks French anymore? And whose fault would that be?"

Albert glanced meaningfully at the body Thomas had carried in. "Oh?" Do you really want to start this again? Right here, right now? "There's plenty of virus here, and all I would have to do is get an arm functional to kill the one thing standing between this world and eternal peace."

Thomas stood over X protectively. "You wouldn't."

Albert raised an eyebrow at him now. They _both _knew how far he would go.

"You won't." Dr. Light still had one more trick up his sleeve: X would survive even if his body was destroyed. Still, that was a last resort, and not the real reason Wily wouldn't do it. "If he dies now, even if Zero doesn't figure out that you killed him, he'll know that it was the virus' fault. He'll _never _help you then, and you need him."

Albert groaned, conceding the point. "_Cainbots_. Less difficult than your brood, but somehow even more stupid. As useful as that is sometimes, why couldn't he figure out that I made those trade-offs between power and endurance for a reason?" Sigma had tried to alter the virus' code in order to win this war because had noticed that it was gradually growing weaker, as all viruses did as they mutated. In order to power it up, Sigma had cut 'unessentials.' Like, for example, half the protections against mutation Dr. Wily had designed it with. The decay was going to go _seriously _exponential now. Why was he surrounded by idiots?

Even his one peer had proven himself one, in the end. And the worst kind.

The stupid screwed up all the time, but it took someone smart to _really _screw up. No one would trust someone who was clearly an idiot with anything important.

"It makes me wonder, that he could alter its code and you can't. Not even the code of the new, less secure versions? Is there really something the great Dr. Wily can't crack? Even if you did make it yourself." As bad an idea as it was to taunt Albert right now, he did need to know. If it was possible for him to crack the virus, that meant that it was possible to crack it, period. And until this war, until Sigma had altered it, Thomas had been fairly convinced that it wasn't. If there was a crack in its defenses that Wily knew about, then he had a chance to find it. AI was his specialty, after all.

Albert smirked. "I am the greatest genius humanity will ever produce. No human could possibly create anything that I can't crack."

"So you _can _crack it?" And restore the virus' endurance so that it didn't just all die and drop out of the sky within a year? Not good in the short term, even if it meant that it would be possible to eventually find a way to destroy it.

"Of course not. I merely created the potential for Zero and the virus, just as you created the potential for Blues and X. Zero created the virus, and no human could possibly crack the power of a god."

"Not this again." Now Albert was going to start cackling unless Thomas headed him off. "What kind of god goes and gets himself killed twice in under twenty-four hours…" He shook his head and started working on removing the damaged parts and clearing the debris out of X's systems.

"I _told_ you to take that comparative religion course with me instead of waiting until the last minute to fill the requirement and getting stuck with…"

"Don't remind me."

"Or perhaps the university should have required_ more_ ethnic studies courses." You could have used them. "Either way, only Zero, his chosen or another god could weild the virus, and since he keeps me busy like this I don't have the time to try to initialize another god. He'd just kill them while they were weak, anyway," he said with some trace of pride. Zero was certainly the strongest, idiot or not. "If it were possible for me to make another virus instead of waiting on Zero, I'd have done it myself and humanity would be extinct already, so give up. Neither you nor these primitive modern idiots are going to be able to crack it."

Thomas grimaced, then glanced up at him. "You're not getting to work on Zero?" It was a little hard to work with Albert just standing there looking at him.

Albert waved him off. "I'm thinking." Since he was going to have to build a new frame anyway, how much of this body did he want to salvage? Then there was the issue of authenticity. He shouldn't have let Sigma use one of Zero's spare bodies just to attack X with, but that had been back when it seemed like this would be over soon instead of dragging on ridiculously like this.

Like last time, too.

The really _frustrating _thing was that Zero could end it any time that he wanted to… Oh, for crying out loud, even he was thinking of his creation as Zero now. Well, the crimson hunter who ran from his power had little in common with the warrior who had used it with a ruthless efficiency Wily's robot masters should have had, would have had if Dr. Light had ever been right about them at all. The closest he'd come was during the second war, and yet…

Actually, that had been the second war this time. Ironic that the first war last time had been Megaman trying to reclaim his brothers and this time the second had been X trying to reclaim Zero, who had never been his in the first place. Except they hadn't known that at the time and even after Zero discovered who he was he was _still _being difficult about it.

"After all the work I've done for him," and on him, "he won't take five minutes to create a couple improved viruses and create world peace." Well, one for world peace, one so that he could keep X if he cared that much. "Where did I go wrong?"

"Where did you go right, you mean," Thomas corrected him, wincing at the amount of damage to X's protective foam 'skin' under the armor. He wasn't going to have to replace that, thankfully. No, the nanites would take care of that now that he'd gotten X hooked up to a power source, but it didn't bode well for the amount of damage the components it was cushioning had taken.

"I can't take credit for him being inherently ethical any more than you can take credit for Blues being inherently too logical to be unethical. Especially when, like you, I was basically trying to make him be evil." Even in the books Asimov's three laws hadn't kept robots from hurting humans, they had just caused them to drop dead in an instant if they violated them. After the fact. And not only had even Dr. Light's _working _version been buggy and the work of a few minutes to remove, but the fact that Dr. Light had given Blues some incredibly stupid orders meant that it had kept trying to trigger his generator to blow up every time he had an independent thought.

Albert knew he would have killed anyone who did that to him.

Let alone one of his creations.

Actually, he basically had. Even if it turned out it hadn't been quite enough overkill.

Although soon enough it would be. "You're both on borrowed time. You know that."

Thomas didn't even bother to look up so Albert could see him roll his eyes. They both knew how he'd respond to that. "_We_ both are." Him and Albert. They'd both already died, after all.

"Not that. I can replace my infrastructure."

"Until the virus is destroyed." By Zero or by some miracle.

"The virus makes things easier, but it's not the only thing keeping me around. You, on the other hand, only have those capsules. And they're wearing out. If I hadn't loaned you my resources, you would have had to hook X up to that capsule and basically completely disassemble it in order to keep him stable and repair him well enough that he could be taken back to their headquarters to recover." As for what would have happened if a maverick had stumbled upon them? "You wouldn't have been able to salvage any of it. If you keep on like this we both know what will happen." Just as both of them could run calculations on the virus' decay over time.

"I know." And I know you know. He kept working.

"Once you're dead, he's dead. It's only a matter of time."

"Technology is improving. They might be able to make replacement parts he can use soon." Instead of disassembling the armors Dr. Light made him, trying to compensate for the injuries he took during wartime. He had to hide the capsules where mavericks wouldn't find them but X could, he had to… He had to.

This was his son.

"I doubt it." The virus kept all research crippled: Sigma wasn't _that _stupid. Of course, the virus _was _decaying, and with it would go Sigma's intelligence. "And are you really going to take that chance?"

"What choice do I have?" When Albert opened his mouth, Thomas added, "_Besides_ no longer helping X fight the virus."

"You're just helping him kill both of you," Albert warned him. "If you just surrendered…"

"I would say over my dead body, except that would be redundant." He'd already proved everything he needed to, after all.

"You may be…" No. "Zero will miss X, if he died."

What? "Haven't you been trying to get him to kill X all this time?"

"I'm not brain-damaged anymore: I can take a hint." Doing the same thing over and over again and thinking the result would be different was not only a definition of insanity, but bad science. "If X is the reason Zero is being so difficult, I _suppose_ I'll let him live." The virus would be an even better fate for the last Lightbot than death, really.

"That was why I helped him." With those armors and their precious materials. The closest thing to lifeblood he had left. So, Dr. Wily really had finally figured out that if X died because of all this, he lost. That was a good thing, for X's sake, but not for the world. "He's a good man, your Zero."

"Too good." Weren't they all. And it killed them all. "Maybe I should just try to initialize a new god while the virus has some strength left." Having Zero out of commission for awhile might let him get a decent start. There was the parts problem, but there would soon be all this decaying virus around to try to influence.

"And they'll refuse to help you as well, most likely. The way both Blues and Zero did. Albert… you're not doing the right thing."

"Of course I'm not. I'm doing the necessary thing. I don't expect _you _to understand."

"Albert, you're proving me _right_." Thomas shook his head. "Robots destroying humanity was what I was afraid of. That was what started all this, that's why the governments ordered the destruction, that's why… I was wrong, they were wrong, and now you're making those nightmares come true." Making the fear, the racism _valid_.

"And you already proved me right first." That humans would do terrible things, like the ones Dr. Light had listed.

Dr. Light closed his eyes and bowed his head, shaking it. No, he knew this wouldn't work. It was too late for that.

Even if that was his old Jimi Hendrix poster, up on the wall that didn't exist. Even if that, if all of this, was proof his friend still remembered, was still in there, it was too late to reach him. All he could do was entrust his hope for the future to X, and Zero, because it was too late to fix things long-dead and still not buried.

* * *

_This incorporates quite a bit of not only my Classicverse but the Megaman Megamix manga. The three laws installed into Blues are buggy and that's what's responsible for his power source problem, the MMC2 Wilybots were scarier than any other set, the government ordered the recovered lightbots destroyed and they were basically saved thanks to Wilybot intervention (and innocent rms being killed got raised to game canon by a later game, like a lot of Megamix stuff), etc._

_Things being worn down, objects and people (or technology, in Alia's case: she's a product of the fact so much has been lost since X and Zero were built) is the main ongoing theme. X's chapter shows why he can keep functioning despite the games saying that he really shouldn't be able to (no replacement parts). However, that's not manna from heaven._

_I thought that the next fic I'd do for this would probably be post X-8 and focus on Axl, or at the most post-CM instead, but I had the lab scene appear in my head when I needed a distraction, so I started writing. What's awesome is that I have a new theory because of this._

_Wily drinking beer (Wily Beer) is a Bob and George reference. I wanted to have Dr. Light drink one and comment on that, but sadly the level of détente between them wasn't enough for Dr. Light to be tossed a beer or allowed to raid the fridge. There's also a lot of German!Wily fanon, with him knowing the language or programming Zero with knowledge of it. Add in that they live in Japan and Wily was an otaku, so that's at least three languages that he knows. Sagasse is French (Sagasse is Serges' name in Japan), so that's reasonable. Latin and Greek get used for a lot of terminology. It's easy to justify him growing up in a house with a German parent or grandmother, learning French and Latin at school (if he was from the Eastern seaboard: in my experience French is what people tend to learn there, like Spanish here, and my middle school required two languages), Japanese for fun and to deal with tech companies and so on. Let's not even start on how many programming languages he knows._

_The term for him would really be polymath… Look at Zero, and his RMs. No wonder it's Megamix canon he's smarter than Dr. Light._


	3. What shall be

Things that inspired this:

X gets a lot stronger immediately after Zero's sacrifice.

Unique, not-well-understood systems meaning difficult repairs.

What happens to X's armors and weapons.

A very good fic that I found on someone's favorites list.

Conversations with two reviewers.

The consequences of informed abilities.

Silence can be as revealing as a confession of guilt, because if someone _isn't _surprised by something…

And a conversation with my muse about a conversation she was having with someone that argued that humans didn't lose to cosmic horrors. My reply was that we do lose to the things that inspired cosmic horrors and the realism movement in fiction in general (volcanoes, the undertow, etc.), and that humanity's… impressiveness was often found in areas that we don't notice because we take them for granted.

Catching balls, walking upright, the sensitivity of our fingertips… there's a lot of stuff that we only find out makes rocket science look easy when we try to reproduce it. A lot of things classify humanity as The Mario (look up TVTropesdotorg) aptitude-wise: I'd put us as fragile speedster in the context of reploids: higher agility and so on, but we squish easily and we're hard to repair. X and Zero would be glass cannons (incredibly powerful, incredibly hard to repair) if not for, well.

There's a general assumption in fiction that robots will be stronger, tougher, faster, able to live longer, have better balance and reaction times (a review to one fic was surprised that I would make a point of Zero needing his body to be properly balanced: imagine what would happen to a real-life swordsman if their center of balance was suddenly off by as much as a foot.)

I had already considered that since humans aren't vulnerable to infection, everyone would be a lot better off if humans were physically capable of fighting mavericks. As I considered the above points, I started to realize that, actually, humans might end up being the better adapted/'superior' of the two species. Theoretically we wouldn't be, but the foundation of the scientific method is when theory clashes with reality, reality wins. If mavericks were ideological, as some argue/would prefer, then reploids actually being around humans would help too.

One of the notebook fic AUs that I haven't written out involved the Maverick Hunter support staff (spotters and so on) being almost entirely human for these reasons, among several others. And I do need to write it out, because it would make Who You Choose to Be make a lot more sense. There's a lot of background I just couldn't given in WYCtB without ruining the mystery/mindscrew that was the whole point of it, but providing another AU with almost the same history in a clearer form as a cheat sheet wouldn't be a bad idea…

Disclaimer: I don't own Megaman X or anything else copyrighted that might be mentioned in here: Capcom and any other rightful owners do.

* * *

X knew, of course.

Well, not _knew_. He doesn't _know_ why he's immune, either. He doesn't even know _that _he's immune: yes, he hasn't been infected so far, but the virus can _affect_ him (a rather unpleasant disorientation when he runs into too much of the stuff), and what if some day it turns out it's just a rather strong resistance, or Sigma manages to create another virus? The 'Zero virus' might have mimicked Zero's readings, but it still hadn't worked. That was a relief, but what is one of the main reasons X may be immune?

His nanites are so unique, his reading so different from any other reploid, that the virus can't disguise itself in its systems. What if Sigma could create a virus that mimicked him? What if that could take him over?

A rather worrying theoretical possibility, one he doesn't discuss with 'the children,' of course. Still, it's just a theoretical possibility.

There are a lot of things he doesn't discuss with them, things he should theoretically tell _someone_, but they get worried so easily and would have a hard time hiding the important things. Not that the situation isn't worrying, not that it isn't outright terrifying, but something Dr. Cain told him once still rings true.

The greatest benefit of growing old is that things bother you less. When you first encounter a problem, you don't have any idea if you can solve it or not. And it's harder because you don't have any experience, and that difficulty scares you more, and makes it even harder to solve. However, if you have solved it before, then it's far simpler, not just because you know how, but because you know _that _you know how. Instead of having two problems, the problem itself and the panic caused by the problem, Dr. Cain had found that he could just focus on the problem the second time through.

Much, much easier.

Even if they were only simulations in his capsule, and it's entirely different when real people are dying, X has seen most of this before.

Not the virus, no, Dr. Light hadn't predicted that, but robot masters being kidnapped and reprogrammed had made it into the legends, had been the reason why he created X in the first place. So how you treated people when they weren't responsible for their actions but still needed to be stopped, how you treated people who might have their wills taken away from them at any time… He knew this.

Sigma, Double, so many others… it was just like what Dr. Wily and some unscrupulous corporations had done to robot masters. It was exactly the thing he had been built to prevent, really.

But then, even humans weren't immune to reprogramming, to having their wills altered. Perhaps true freedom, true free will, was only a dream.

But Dr. Light had wanted to give that to him, and he wanted to give it to his children.

It would go faster if he could get some help with this, but any other reploid (except Zero, but he was no scientist) could be infected, and then Sigma would know what X knew. As for humans, Sigma had made it very clear that any human who studied reploid systems, even if they weren't trying to create an antivirus, would be killed very, very quickly, likely because he knew how much easier that would make research.

Of course, Sigma probably already knew, but if he knew X knew…

Or if Zero knew X knew.

Because X was almost certain at this point that Zero _knew_, but Zero was under enough stress as it was. If pretending to be normal, if forgetting for awhile was what Zero needed, then he owed it to him. In the same way that he owed all of the children his friendship, owed it to them to forget that they could go maverick at any time, owed it to them to treat them as though they would live to turn ten.

Sigma could say X was too trusting all he liked, but trust had nothing to do with it. Of course he could trust them, the virus had nothing to do with _them_.

They were child soldiers, and he owed it to them to play pretend, play pretend that they would never be turned against all that they believed in.

Zero, however, wasn't a child.

There were two theories as to why X was immune: the majority theory was that X was immune because of Dr. Light's systems, and if only they could make some technical breakthrough then everyone could be retrofitted with immunity, or constructed to be immune from birth.

The minority theory, the minority being X, was that his age was the key factor.

There were only two living reploids over the age of ten, except for those like Sigma who had been infected before they reached that age: X and Zero. Although, technically, X was an android.

And he was almost certain Zero was as well.

Age wasn't something other reploids wanted to believe was important. After all, they were just as intelligent as adult humans when they were turned on. They were expected to be adults as soon as they were, and resented it when X or humans tried to gently point out to them that they might have been products of intelligent design, but no mass-produced problem set was any substitute for personal beta testing.

In several areas of performance humanity actually did have the edge on reploids, because while reploids had been intelligently designed by people who really didn't know all that much (himself and Dr. Cain), humanity was the product of millions of years of beta testing and bug fixes. Sensory data systems especially were important for people, like the hunters, who might be ambushed at any time, and the average human had far better senses than any reploid who wasn't a specialist (and in order to specialize in one thing a reploid had to be weaker in other areas), and were much better at sorting and processing that information. Back when humans could be in the field without dying instantly, X had seen how important 'hunches' were.

A specialist reploid could have better sight, better hearing, a chemical lab for scent if they made free space for it by getting rid of other systems, but the advantage humans had that they still couldn't match was the _software_.

Walking upright was actually an incredibly complicated process, and humanity was still far better at keeping its balance. To wield a beam saber the way Zero did and Sigma had without falling over from all the unusual movements required intense focus, the majority of the reploid's processing power, and a specialized, incredibly intricate, physical design. X and Dr. Cain had redesigned Sigma's body several times, when he was head of the hunters, since that agility made it easy for him to bring clumsy, non-specialist defective reploids in unharmed.

Sigma had been state-of-the-art, in terms of 'combat' reploids, and Zero had still easily defeated him and two units of hunters. Zero had been built to kill, and by someone with technology better than 21XX's best. There really was no other explanation.

And, frankly, humans were still better at it.

The beam saber's damage was more easily repaired than the buster's, which had been why Sigma wanted to use it. They had brought in a few human fencing and kenjutsu experts to do motion capture and figure out how it worked, and neither Zero nor Sigma, even now, was anywhere near as good as they had been. Give one of those humans the durability of a reploid, and they would win.

Sadly, that wasn't possible.

Durability. Lifespan. The one area in which humanity could, theoretically, never catch up with reploidkind.

Except that, with two exceptions, humans still lived far longer. The average reploid lifespan was five years. The average human lifespan, despite all Sigma and the cataclysm had done, was thirty, and if they managed to make it to twenty-five then they could expect to live into their fifties. Or longer, barring act of virus.

Before the cataclysm, the child mortality rate had been miniscule. Now, the ones who couldn't handle this environment, despite all of modern medical technology, often just… died.

Just like reploids, really. The difference being that while humans were vulnerable to a whole host of things, like radiation, that reploids weren't, most humans were living to turn twenty.

While no reploids were. None at all. Even Sigma and the other senior mavericks had died several times.

It made X smile sadly, the idea that people could look at these statistics and still think that reploids were in any way the stronger, smarter, superior race.

Could look at this world and think that he had done anything but failed. He'd failed to give his children what they needed to survive.

X could understand why they needed to tell themselves that they could handle things, and needed to protect themselves against the very idea that they couldn't, but so many problems that newbuilt reploids found utterly insurmountable were so very easy once you knew the (often counterintuitive) trick to them, and since they didn't want to listen to their elders…

X had learned very quickly that telling people how to do things up front very rarely worked. It was better to make it clear that he was willing to give advice and then try not to act in any way they might consider patronizing when one of the more intelligent of the newbuilts swallowed their pride and crept into his office to ask him something.

This was always brought home to him whenever he got a new spotter. Dr. Alia certainly wasn't stupid, and she'd gone through spotter training, but there were things that newbuilt reploids had to be told, and so spotters were trained to tell them, that X knew already. He was always torn between retraining them to know how to look for what he looked for, so they knew what they actually needed to tell him, and just letting it go, since if he did that then she might end up not mentioning something that was actually important, or if she got transferred to another hunter and assumed he was as experienced as X…

Not that she was likely to get transferred.

_The clock was ticking_.

They might be trying to get Sigma to think she was a lowly spotter, but he'd always known how important it was to keep an eye on any possible command staff.

How many years old was she now? She was already starting to mother the new recruits, which they were finding very irritating since she didn't know how to do it without stepping on toes yet.

He didn't want to think about the fact that very soon now, he was going to be presented with a new spotter and have to decide what to do about this all over again.

Very soon now, perhaps, since Dr. Gate had been taken, and Dr. Gate knew Alia. The fact that the Hunters had been trying to hide a staff member with scientific training?

He would have to start spending more time with her, keeping a closer eye on her. It wouldn't save her, but it would delay the inevitable. And then when she was taken, Sigma would probably say that he was too trusting yet again, not realizing that he would have let himself get close to her _because _she would be a maverick (or dead) someday, in order to delay it as long as he could.

Perhaps even until a cure was found?

He could hope.

He could watch over Zero.

Because the events of this war had really removed all doubts that Zero was the key to all of this.

Well, if X wanted to be fair, the second war had done that.

X and Zero were both incredibly hard to repair, due to how different their designs were from those of reploids. X knew his own systems as well as anyone living did, and he could generally keep damage from affecting his performance during the war by moving parts around, pushing certain systems into the red which increased function at the cost of more wear and tear, but if he didn't have the armors, Dr. Light's gifts, to take apart for real replacement parts? If he hadn't been designed with so much redundancy? The accumulated damage, the accumulated strain, and the additional strain caused by jury-rigged, incompatible parts would have crippled him by, oh, the fourth war?

Dr. Cain had _not _wanted him to join the Hunters, and for good reason.

It had been _suicidal _for Zero to join the Hunters, and Sigma had only allowed it because, due to Zero's guilt, if Zero had been turned down, denied a chance to atone for the hunters he had killed, then the most likely alternative would have been _actual _suicide. At least being in the hunters had given Zero a fighting chance to work out his issues and get out before the damage killed him, and his training had been focused on avoiding damage (which his design allowed him to do most of the time), which had made him the obvious choice when X needed an instructor.

Zero should have been a 'glass cannon,' to use an old term X had heard once. He shouldn't have survived the first war either way, and so, afterwards, X hadn't been all that surprised that he had blown himself up. Saddened, but not surprised.

That was the moment that had forced X to acknowledge that Sigma's warnings or not, Dr. Cain's pleas or not, he had to use the full potential of his systems, even if it meant he risked burning himself out. Even if it meant he might not even last long enough to get to Sigma before his own body failed him. If he'd _let_ Vile kill him because he was holding back, then the war would have been lost either way.

And yet, the parts he'd stolen from the mavericks during the second war had been in perfect repair. Practically new. The virus had taken doctors, yes, but none of them were on the level of him or Cain. How had they been able to do what should have been impossible?

There was only one way for the mavericks to know Zero's systems better than X did, especially when that knowledge clearly didn't translate to any other areas. No, if they'd been able to duplicate the capabilities Zero had? The normal hunters wouldn't stand a chance. And if they could replicate the parts that enabled them, then logically, they should understand the principles. Figuring out the principles would have been necessary in order to figure out how Zero worked and how to create more parts.

So the only explanation for why mavericks were so weak, comparatively, was that they _hadn't _figured out how Zero worked. Which only made sense if they'd already _known_ the designs of his parts and all they'd been doing was copying a template, a template so different from modern reploids that they couldn't figure out how to give modern reploids those capabilities.

Like the nightmares, in this last war. Zero's body without his mind. His body intertwined with the virus. Zero had tried to hide that it made him stronger, and that itself had given his secret away. If it had been surprising to Zero, then it would have worried him. He would have asked about it.

Zero knew.

X wasn't certain how long he'd known for.

Well, no, Zero had definitely known by the end of the third war. The trouble was there was a difference between knowing something and admitting you knew it. It was entirely possible that Zero was _still _in denial, or had wiped his memories of it, or…

Regardless, there's no reason to bring it up, he thinks yet again as he carefully strips down Zero's armor, looking for a certain part and wishing he had the tactile sensitivity humans did. X's eyes are on full magnification, and he's done everything he can to keep his body from being jostled by anything up to and including a nearby explosion, but these parts are precious enough that he's really wishing Dr. Cain was still able to work.

True, he likely doesn't need to be this paranoid. Armor, being armor, was designed to stand up to explosions and blasts and so on, unlike X's body. Dr. Light had really hoped that he would be able to live in peace, and so while X was quite sturdy there's a difference between designed to survive accidents and specialized for warfare.

Like there's a difference between X and Zero.

Also, dust and stray electrical charges are different from concussion damage, and in combat these parts wouldn't have been exposed to the air unless the armor had been sliced through, in which case they would have been useless anyway, so why protect them from it? Often, giving protection against one thing means another sort of protection has to be skimped on, and there's only so much space.

Most of it is taken up by alloy, too. Cutting through it to remove the energy disruptors and self-repair units without having the cutting laser disrupted or the self-repair systems burn themselves up repairing the cut? X had barely been able to salvage anything of his first armor.

Although he is trying not to pay attention since it's distracting, he can hear Zero fidgeting, tapping his fingers on the table, as he sits there with his leg open.

Another reason X doesn't need to be as careful as he is? The virus doesn't put Zero's systems into overdrive. No, it increases the amount he can safely do, functioning as everything from power source (so he doesn't have to push his reactor the way X does) to ball bearings and oil, the nanites arranging themselves…

Well, that was just a theory, it wasn't as though he could see it in action, but there was wear on Zero's parts (that tended to vanish very quickly, within a few weeks of the war) that had very… unique patterns.

The first time Zero had encountered Dr. Light's capsules, they hadn't been able to make anything for him, and Zero hadn't mentioned it because, well, X's father. Or his ghost in the machine, at least.

Zero had only told him when the capsules had been able to make him an armor, even though it didn't interface with his systems the way X's did, since he'd needed to explain where he got it. X's armors functioned practically as a part of his own body, which was fortunate since it meant they were well suited to being rendered into parts for his own body. Zero's first gifted armor had been mainly self-contained, barely interfacing with him at all, but the successive ones kept improving.

Which was a good sign, wasn't it? That his father's capsule viewed Zero as trustworthy, worth helping? Or had X's 'too-trusting nature' run in the family?

In any case, the war was over. For now, anyway. His buster was deactivated and defragmenting – he was worried that one of these days someone would actually figure out how to keep him from copying his enemies' abilities. He could still manage it, but between copy protection efforts and just basic compatibility problems, keeping the mode configurations set up for too long caused all sorts of bugs. Given the fact that weapons development was one of the few types of research the war wasn't hurting, the new weapons were always stronger than the old ones anyway, so there was no actual benefit to keeping them around, as he'd had to explain several times.

Douglas, Lifesaver, Signas, Alia… everyone new suggested that he keep the armor and weapons, without realizing what an insulting question that was, not just to him but to their predecessors. Did they really think that they were the first ones to ever think of that?

No, it probably hadn't occurred to them that they needed to think of what other people would have thought. That was actually rather advanced theory of mind. Children. Too young to have really grasped the concept that other people were people just like them even though they weren't exactly alike. There was a difference between knowing that and understanding it. The concept took years, a decade or more, to sink in for humans, who were evolutionarily used to it.

They were children, members of a race of children.

There.

X blew on the part carefully. Now that he got a good look at it, yes, that was actual quartz, naturally occurring (not perfect enough to be artificially made). There was also an unusual amount of gold involved, as in the previous armor, and while it was an excellent conductor and Dr. Light, as a robotics manufacturer, would have had stockpiles that might still be around…

If the capsules were having to scavenge for materials, than using naturally-occurring ones like quartz made sense, but the gold argued that there still were stockpiles, and that meant that locating natural quartz would have been additional work.

Not to mention that X's armors contained pre-made chips. Light Robotics chips, in fact, indicating that no, the stockpiles weren't beginning to empty. And yet not a single one of those chips would be found in Zero's armor. No: they were all built from scratch, using more and more… not exotic but idiosyncratic materials.

If X were less of a doctor and more of a scientist, he would have installed one of the Light Robotics chips from his armor into Zero's when he did one of these repairs in order to observe what happened. The risk of pre-programmed alarm bells ringing and causing him to freak out was too great, however. If his system detected tampering with that kind of threat level, then it might get rid of all the other tampering X and Dr. Cain had already done. Like, oh, the things that enabled Zero's sanity.

The way self-repair worked for most reploids was that they would have pockets of raw materials in various places, like the vacuoles in cells, and when the nanites that roamed their body discovered a discrepancy between their current state and their optimal state, they would use those raw materials to replace, oh, a millimeter of alloy scraped off of a kneecap. Most reploids had conscious control over this, although while someone was being shot at it was only sensible to let automatic systems take care of it so the alerts didn't distract them.

Zero didn't have conscious control over the majority of his systems, including all of the ones that should have given him data on his body more specific than 'there's a limb missing.' Exterior sensory data, yes, but he was locked out of the processes of his own body in the same way humans couldn't just query their heart rate and instruct it to slow down a little, for example.

X and Dr. Cain had needed to repair Zero when he came in, of course, and the fact he couldn't tell his body to _stop helping_ had made things much more difficult than they needed to be. There were entire categories of materials that his body's nanites would register as foreign substances and deposit outside the body.

Copper wiring. Who designed a reploid to have an excessive immune reaction, in other words to be allergic to, copper wiring?

A megalomaniac who thought that gold alone was good enough for his creation?

Zero's nanites were _good _at converting raw materials into usable form (another sign that he had been designed for war), but paranoid enough that anything too obviously artificial, something that seemed too much like it didn't belong, was summarily thrown out and Zero didn't have the ability to tell his systems to leave important things alone.

When repairing Zero, simpler was better. Anything too complicated, that might have secondary, threatening functions?

Meaning that if anything complicated _did _get destroyed and need to be replaced, Zero's own healing factor would have kept them from saving him.

The way it had been keeping Lifesaver from getting his leg back at one hundred percent.

Quartz. Timed pulses. That could _theoretically _work as a substitute for humanity's inner ear and multitude of tiny muscles dedicated to keep them upright, but whoever thought it up had to be a genius. X never would have, and the complexity involved in getting it to work!

Frankly, X thought, turning the sensor over in his hands as he walked back to Zero, it was a very good thing Zero had mentioned that he didn't have this problem while he was in the armor, and a very good thing he'd gotten this piece fairly early in the war – perhaps that had been why it was the first made? Otherwise X wouldn't have taken a closer look and realized that for the first time, there was a component in the armor actually designed to interface with Zero's systems instead of to stay separate and look harmless.

"What's that?" Zero asked, clearly uncomfortable with his surroundings and X's silence. Zero had spent far too much time in labs after he'd been brought in, much of it spent with people who wanted to know why he'd killed all those people or thought that he should be, well, not so much killed as not repaired.

"This might just be what we need. I'd like to install this one now. If there aren't any signs of improvement within a week," it might take some time for Zero's systems to fine-tune the new component, "then I'll have to try something else, but if it does help then there are almost two dozen more of these units spread throughout the armor. That would allow us to replace the other two in your leg and still leave a good supply." For future emergencies.

Like the inevitable wars.

"Does that sound good to you?" X asked Zero. It was never a good idea to pull the 'doctors' orders' card with him.

"Do you think that those could get my agility back to full function? I probably had some of those broken even when I was brought in, huh."

That, to X, sounded as though Zero _knew _that even before the wars had started to slowly destroy irreplaceable (or so they'd thought) systems, his agility had once been greater. He was already easily the best coordinated reploid alive, even counting X as a reploid. "You're right. Wouldn't that be a surprise for Sigma."

Zero should have gloated at that idea, not showed a flash of what was almost certainly guilt. No, it would not be a surprise for Sigma, hmm?

That would indicate that Zero now had memories of his initial rampage, wouldn't it?

"Whoever repaired you that time," after Eurasia, "restored you to full functioning, but that was not a very…" Easy war, X would have said, recalling the struggle to locate uninfected survivors, knowing that the clock was ticking. The virus still had been everywhere, rough on even X's systems, but then X remembered that the virus would have made everything easier for Zero. Not harder.

"Zero," X said instead as he opened the panel he'd carved into Zero's leg a little further, "You're going to have to stop twitching or else you'll have to go into sleep mode again."

Normal reploids could shut down the motor relays while someone was operating on an area. Zero just shook his head. He didn't like being unconscious in an operating room, but he didn't even have enough control over his own body to hold still, let alone turn off the pain sensors.

Frankly, it would have been easiest to just detach Zero's leg, but that would have been… counterproductive.

X still felt a little guilty for not suggesting it to Zero, though.

It was for a good cause, and Zero would understand if X told him, but he couldn't tell him.

It was uncomfortably like lying.

Zero shrugged. "I'd be happier in sleep mode. Alia was practically begging to be in here while you examined my armor, and here I am, bored out of my skull."

Now he was the one expecting to get a smile out of X, and it took X a minute to smile properly, because Zero being out of his own skill, someone or something else being in control of that body, these systems, wasn't a laughing matter.

Zero realized that after an instant and changed the subject. "Where should I lie down?"

"The table over there." X pointed to the one in between the two their armors were on: X had brought his own in for comparison. "It shouldn't take too long, only a couple of hours."

Or so he'd said, and it wasn't really a lie. He had compared them.

Zero nodded, like a good soldier, and after letting X strap his leg down a bit so that if his leg did twitch it wouldn't cause enough movement to break anything (a reploid with reflexes? A reploid with reflexes clearly intended to maim anyone attempting to examine their unconscious body?), went to sleep.

It took X about fifteen minutes to put the part in and connect it as best he could. Ideally, Zero's nanites would fix any problems with the arrangement now that they had an unbroken crystal to work with anyway. And if X needed to fix any problems with his work later, that was just another opportunity.

An opportunity to open up his own armor and remove the scanners and other devices he'd put in it. To get more data on Zero's systems and why, for example, Zero hadn't set off virus scanners when X knew for a_ fact_ that he had been saturated with the stuff ten minutes ago, going out of his way to gather all of it that he could not just to help fight the maverick but so that X didn't wander into any of it.

That raised the worrying possibility that maybe Zero _always _contained the virus, and they just couldn't detect it. That maybe Zero was still infecting people, even now.

X didn't want to tell Zero that was a possibility. He didn't want Zero removed from the Hunters. He was saving lives here, he was _doing something _here, and without that he'd go mad from the guilt.

X didn't want that to be true, because then he would be faced with a choice between letting Zero stay, knowing that this would hasten the day when (not if, he reflected sadly, but when) his friends went maverick, or revealing his secret and forcing him out of the hunters. If that happened? If Sigma knew that someone was conducting research on Zero, that would add _urgency_ to his genocidal agenda. They'd barely recovered from Eurasia: they couldn't survive another massive push like that, if Sigma could scrape up the resources somehow.

And if Zero knew X knew? If the world knew, and hated him for it as they'd hated him for killing all those hunters?

Regardless, there was only so much he could do without anyone figuring anything out. Zero's return and this war had given him, and with these repairs was still giving him, a massive amount of data.

A balance had to be struck between keeping this secret and finding a cure as soon as possible. He couldn't allow the fact that he needed to do the work of analysis alone prevent that work from being done.

But work with something like this in Maverick Hunter headquarters? When someone might walk in, innocently or knowingly spying for the mavericks? The instant someone became infected, they would be willing to tell Sigma all that they knew, all that they'd seen here.

He had his tricks: no one seemed to remember that designed as a game system or not, antique or not, a computer was still a computer. There were a multitude of little things that were taught by experience, or found in old books that no one read anymore.

But he'd need more processing power than that. More privacy than he could get even in his quarters, where he could sweep for bugs but there were still the official cameras, the HQ security system, and while they were only for emergencies and there were a host of safeguards, if the wrong people went maverick at the wrong time?

He needed to get out of headquarters without Sigma suspecting anything.

Luckily that would be easy to arrange.

He was old and tired, everyone knew. He hated the pointless wars, everyone knew. He was sick of fighting, everyone knew.

And everyone knew that as things got older, they got worn out and needed to be replaced by fresh new things. They'd think he was weak if he left the hunters for awhile. He could even say that he would be looking for another way to bring peace and they'd think it was senility.

Children these days had no respect for their elders: humans had been saying that for centuries.

It was cliché because it was true: that was another old saying.

Maybe he should buy a floral print shirt. Sigma would _definitely _assume he'd gone senile then.

The chuckle died on X's lips as he realized that Zero's systems were storing not virus but virus _components_.

…Yes, he needed to study Zero's systems in depth and find some way to disable whatever process was meant to reverse the disassembly and convert those pieces into functional virus _yesterday_.

Or he'd like to, but he needed to make sure that Zero was in full working order, or as full as X could manage, first, because if he took a vacation that would halve their immune hunters and Sigma wouldn't pass up an opportunity like that. It would keep him too busy to look into what X was up to _and _make him move early, before he was fully prepared.

Or so X could hope, at least, and if they lost hope?

The children clung to their pride because they needed to believe that they could do the impossible and live to reach a decade.

Zero clung to the hope that if he just kept fighting, if he just kept buying the world, and X, time then they could fix everything, that he could make up for everything.

And X had to chuckle again, because maybe he was being just as prideful as the children, taking all this on his shoulders. Hoping he could lay the groundwork for a cure, find some say to save them all. It was arrogant, wasn't it, to think that he was wiser than they could be because he was older? To think that he was the only one that could be trusted with this information?

They said he was _too _trusting. They'd probably say that he was being paranoid and hurting the effort to cure the virus if they knew he was keeping the truth about Zero a secret.

There was such a thing as proper paranoia, however, and he had to do this for the same reason he had to keep fighting.

If not him, who else?

* * *

I really do seem to be on a Rockman kick, don't I?

Sorry, introspection heavy and far, far too much telling instead of showing. Also, I don't own the Johnny Maxwell paraphrase at the end either.

A few more notes on viruses: as well as immunity and resistance not being the same thing, currently, if the maverick virus is mutating anything like a biological virus, it is in conditions that would cause it to mutate to grow weaker over time. The initial virus was designed to get X, who was designed to have thirty years of hibernation. Modern reploids don't have any hibernation whatsoever and are much less well put together. The new viruses made seem to be targeted at modern reploids in one case and Zero in the other, in other words even less able to deal with X. From what I recall about Signas' bio, there are in-universe things known to increase resistance (intelligence, etc.). Introspection would indeed increase strength of personality, but there really is no substitute for overcoming life's trials.

A ten-year-old wouldn't have much chance against the initial virus, no, but against the several-generations-removed weaker varieties, one who had been through some hard knocks and figured out where they stand would be pretty resistant: that can be used to justify the presence of reoccurring characters other than Dr. Cain in the later games. While before Sigma was able to do pretty reliable sweeps of the command staff, as of X4 and X5 especially, not so much. For instance, General actually _met _with Sigma and escaped uninfected. Sigma noticing that the virus was becoming weaker might have led to the drastic actions that were X5. That didn't work, and by X8 he could be taken out by, to quote a member of the Maverick Hunter Board of Directors in that fic I need to write, "a four-month old cosplaying fanboy. Time to start planning the victory party."


	4. What is

I've got several fics that need the endings written, my friend is poking me to get around to writing that one fic with… certain people in the maverick hunters, including the one whose 'six-month-old cosplaying fanboy' description of Lumine I keep referencing, and there's also the fem!Zero fic I was going to include Lion and a couple other bunnies in. And yet I have a toss-off line in an RP and I end up writing this.

I blame Dragon Quest VIII, and my monster arena teams No Ordinary Rabbit and Infinite Respawn.

Post-X7: Alia, androids, hot springs, new kids.

* * *

"I leave for a few days and the bomb squad needs to go all over everything again…" X shook his head, rummaging through a cupboard. "I don't know when Sigma would have found the time, but better safe than sorry."

"I didn't even know you had a house before you started talking about moving off base." House, nothing. X had an _island_.

"Well, I _have _it, but it's never really been lived in. I had it built for Dr. Cain more than anything, that's why it's only one story and the doors are so large."

"To accommodate his chair?"

X smiled at her as he nodded, approving. Not many reploids knew about human accessibility issues, and Alia hadn't been on very long at all when Dr. Cain finally died. "He was going to retire here once we got the bugs worked out of reploid design and we didn't need to manage the ER at Irregular Hunter Headquarters, but one thing led to another." There had been a decrease in irregulars as people learned what not to do when building reploids… but then the virus had happened.

"X, can't I go explore outside yet?" Axl popped his head into the storage room.

"The house is clear, but the bomb squad still isn't done scanning the grounds, Axl. Be patient." All three immune hunters in one spot that wasn't HQ was a security _nightmare_. If this wasn't the site of Dr. Light's old lab, X would never have been able to pull it off. Of course, that was why he'd been able to pull off 'retiring' here in the first place.

"Some vacation this is…" He didn't take more than a couple steps down the hall before sticking his head in again. "Can I really have my own room?"

"Pick any that you like, as long as it's not already claimed or in the way of something. Just keep in mind that we only have so many vacation days and even Dr. Light's old security system isn't going to hold up to a determined assault. Sensors and weaponry are not the same thing."

"Don't keep anything here unless I don't care if it gets blown up: Alia already said. Can I keep all my paperwork here?"

"No," three voices said in unison.

"Projects kept here… tend to never get done," X said sadly.

"When did you get here, Zero?" Alia asked, trying to hide a wince at the implications of that. No luck, huh? But then, X hadn't gotten time to do much more than unpack and check the security. So much for covering antivirus research as him retiring from the hunters. It hadn't taken Sigma long to set something up that forced him to come back.

"I came in with Axl, I was just doing a perimeter check. X, I thought you said the power wasn't on yet?"

"It isn't."

"Then what's with all the hot water?"

X needed a minute to remember what Zero was talking about. "Hot wa… Oh. They're geothermal. We found them when we did the in-depth scan of the surrounding area, to see if there were any other preserved facilities, and I asked the architect I hired to do something with them, since they were there." He shook his head. "I hadn't even gotten around to cleaning up that area of the house… Did the trees survive?"

"It's like a jungle in there. Want me to see what I can do?" Zero tilted his head at Axl meaningfully. This would give the kid something to do before he got too nosy. Not that X would leave classified data lying around, that was part of why it had taken him so long to report back once the war started, but still.

"That's a good idea. Axl should learn how to navigate jungle environments without killing the plants, and I've always wanted to try them out. The water should have thereputic qualities even though we're not human: there's a high mineral content and Axl's systems should theoretically be able to make use of ambient materials."

"Try what out?" Alia wondered.

"Hot springs," X told her, before finally finding the spare security system interface and handing it to her. "They're an ancient part of Japanese and Northern European culture."

Zero nodded. "Trying to get in touch with your roots?"

"Roots?"

"It's an expression, Axl." Zero looked a little more severe. "I thought I told you to read through those idioms in your internal dictionary."

"Come on, Zero! When am I ever going to want to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? Were they _trying _to make their language impossible to understand?"

"Sometimes. Slang is useful for signaling whether or not you're part of a group and passing information to other members only. Most mavericks aren't going to know anything about old human expressions, if they're even old enough."

"Like a secret language?" Coded signals?

"Sort of." Zero patted him on the back. "Come on, time for lesson one in how not to kill things."

"We're going to have to get him certified in human and reploid emergency medicine," X reminded himself as Axl followed Zero. "Alia, could you…"

"I'll schedule the classes." She made a note on her datapad as she adjusted the headset X had handed her. She whistled when it came online. "Not bad for a system that was offline for a hundred years." And had been pretty thoroughly trashed in the cataclysm.

"I think the same AI that manages the armor capsules has been repairing it. There wasn't anywhere near this much sensor coverage when I was found, much less the signal jamming. If the net had been operational, Dr. Cain wouldn't have been able to find me."

What would have happened if he hadn't?

Knowing what she knew now, Alia shuddered to think. If X hadn't been found first, and reploids weren't based off of Dr. _Light's_ designs…

Time to change the subject. "The two of you are really focusing on getting Axl up to speed. You're that certain that he's immune?"

"Yes. He's too foreign a life form. In biological terms, he's an entirely different species from ordinary reploids. The virus camouflages itself in a reploid's systems and goes after their mind. It can't hide in his systems, it can't alter a mind that… the vulnerabilities it normally abuses, the behavior patterns it creates, just aren't there. He's as different from reploids as we are from robot masters. Sigma tried to create a virus that would go after atypical systems during the Eurasia Incident."

Alia didn't shudder. "The Zero virus."

"It didn't work, and he had years to study Zero's systems and try to crack his immunity." They both knew that Sigma, or at least some of his underlings, knew more about Zero's systems than they did. Or at least the knowledge was there… "They shouldn't know where to start with Axl. Whoever designed him to be immune looked at the handholds the virus uses to get a grip on reploid systems, and went through and ensured that none of them existed. There's just nothing for it to work with."

"There are diseases that cross species barriers," Alia reminded him.

"Yes. Very few that cross kingdom barriers."

"What do national borders have to do with it?"

"Kingdom, phylum, class…"

"…Order, genus, species." Right, she felt silly. "You really think that he's _that _different?"

"You haven't been studying him?"

"I haven't found the time to do more than look over the preliminary reports."

"It's theoretically possible that the virus could reproduce in the systems of a reploid of his type if they somehow were tricked into thinking that it was a component that was supposed to be there. As for it affecting their minds, that's just not possible."

"That's amazing."

"Of course, that wouldn't be true of hybrids," X cautioned her. "It's not the copy system that gives him immunity, it's the fact he doesn't have a reploid's processor. We still don't know how to make more of him. The fact it's so difficult to alter his mind means we can't just use him as a baseline to alter." The way reploids were made by altering X's baseline design and nanites.

"The copy systems and a few of his other tricks should improve resistance, though. Make it harder for the virus to survive long enough to get to their minds."

"That has its own problems."

"What do you mean?" How could resistance not be a good thing?

"We all concluded that Sigma attempted Eurasia because the virus was weakening. The last thing we want is to start breeding a stronger virus for him."

The thought made her wince.

"It's a pity we're not going to be able to stop it."

"What do you mean?"

"…Alia, how would you react if some group tried to stop people from building reploids that would resist the virus?"

She'd assume they'd gone maverick. If it were X, who couldn't go maverick?

Alia had never realized that she resented him before. The nightmare that they all lived in fear of? She'd listened to the audio logs of the fourth war, she'd heard him ask Zero to kill him if the worst ever happened. She knew that X didn't see himself as privileged, special.

But he was. He was immune. He was Dr. Light's creation. He had things they only dreamed of. Like immunity. If he were actually to try to keep them from the rest of them… "They're going to start building reploids with copy systems and the other tweaks that we can replicate as soon as they can."

"No one wants to send children out to die without the best protection we can give them," X agreed. "You can't blame people for not wanting to die."

"If the virus starts growing stronger…"

"Dr. Cain built Signas to be immune with the best technology we had at the time. You were built for a similar purpose, and you've been retrofitting yourself since then. If technology improves and the virus grows to match it, then… Well, at least you're much older than the average reploid."

Yes. Alia was aware of that. "I thought it wasn't polite to mention a lady's age."

What? "…Alia, you're not even… It would still be illegal for me to date you if we were human."

"I know. Sorry. It's a bit of a sore spot." Calling her a fussy old lady… "Axl's just making it worse. He makes everyone feel old."

"He's young. Not just newbuilt, but young. It's fascinating." X almost seemed fond of it. Anyway, "If age is linked to resistance, then you and Signas will hopefully be fine."

"Hopefully." The maverick virus regularly dashed hopes.

"Hey, X?" An unfamiliar aquatic reploid rushed in. "Zero wants to know if you have swimsuits." At least the voice was recognizably Axl's.

"Didn't you bring your own? There's the ocean right here."

"I don't own one." Clothes were a human thing.

X blinked. "I thought Zero got you kitted out."

"With necessities and stuff. The stuff normal people have?"

"…Right. Zero isn't really someone for…" Luxuries, fun things, anything that wasn't a necessity. "Remind me to take you shopping sometime. I'll order some and have them teleported over. Alia, did you bring a swimsuit?"

Now X was looking at her like he didn't have any idea why she wouldn't own a swimsuit.

This was one of those moments that caused most people to think that X was not quite all there and Lifesaver to mutter to himself under his breath about senility when his real self was working in a private corner somewhere.

"It's no trouble to order one for you," he assured her when she didn't answer.

"I appreciate the thought. I was planning to just try and get some work done while I was here, but…" If the others were going to be hitting the beach and trying out this hot spring, she couldn't just stay off to the side without making X feel like he was a bad host. It should be ok, right? "That sounds great. Thank you, X."

* * *

The first problem with the swimsuit was getting it on.

In the old days, they had at least _tried _to copy X's design closely enough that reploids could pass for humans when they were wearing clothing. Part of that had been the capability to wear clothing instead of armor in the first place. Every reploid had foam padding encasing their systems, for shock absorption, but there were always space constraints.

It was ironic that female models were generally less well-padded than male models. Female models were smaller, so often parts had to just be jammed in where they would fit. It wasn't like Alia had been built to be shot at or jumping down ten feet several times a day: she was a desk jockey, a scientist. She wasn't supposed to be getting shocks that would need absorbing.

X's armor contained his weapons systems: he was capable of actually disarming without what amounted to minor surgery. It also contained a lot of protective systems, obviously, which was appropriate for armor.

Alia's boots couldn't be taken off. She needed that large area there. They weren't additional balance systems: they _were _her balance systems. She couldn't walk without them, and most of them didn't come off. Well, at least she didn't need the removable parts while she was sitting down, but she'd need to put them back on to walk over to the hot spring.

It was a good thing that the swimsuit was stretchy fabric and not much of it, because otherwise she'd have ripped it apart just trying to get in.

X must not know. He hadn't been working on reploid design aside from virus research since the days when people who cut corners got in trouble. When the hunters were more like paramedics, when people cared about reploids being able to fit into human society instead of thinking that everyone was safer when people could identify a reploid on sight and keep their distance in case they were maverick.

She could have said it would be too much trouble to go swimming. She could have looked to the side and let him figure out that she was self-conscious about her body, and then he would have apologized and said it was alright. Let her go off and do her own thing.

Except that would have made X feel guilty, both for forgetting that she might be uncomfortable and for not being able to work all this out in the first place. The ability to fit human standards of beauty was one more thing that he had, as an android, that he hadn't been able to give the rest of them.

So she'd just have to get the swimsuit on and go in there with them and just… carry herself like it didn't matter that she had colored metal bits sticking out of her in various places, and…

It was just so unfair.

She'd managed to put the damn thing on, finally. She'd managed to stop looking in the mirror, wishing that she'd covered her chest compartments over with padding (bigger was better, right?) and wincing over how… asymmetrical, misshapen, malformed, _ugly_ she looked. She'd taken a deep breath, told her vanity to get over itself, and stepped out the door of the 'women's' changing area.

Only for the first sight that greeted her to be Zero.

Zero who didn't even have the grace to realize why she was staring at him and looking like this was the last straw.

She hadn't _meant _to stammer something out and shut the door behind her, but it was just so unfair.

If 'drop-dead gorgeous' was a word, Zero's picture would be in the dictionary by it. Everyone knew that Zero was handsome. And 'everyone' hadn't seen him wearing only a swimsuit, bare feet walking silently on a faux-wood floor (she hadn't even known he was there, quiet as a cat without the quasi-hydraulics of his armor). Bare wet feet leaving footprints. Water dripping down from blond hair tied into a ponytail (he'd been swimming and his hair didn't even have the grace to look tangled, disarrayed, something other than _perfect). _Glistening facsimiles of muscles reploids didn't _have_.

He was a work of art, beautiful and deadly and she was… She knew, objectively, that she looked good. She got plenty of compliments. She got plenty of jealous stares of her own.

She also knew, objectively, that she wasn't in his league. That of course she would never be as beautiful as that, let alone that strong, that powerful. She'd never have that presence, she'd never quiet a room when she walked into it by force of personality or admiration of image.

She would never be in his league.

She was just a reploid.

She tried not to think about it. About the fact she was living on borrowed time. About how old she was, and how young almost everyone else was because _they kept dying or worse and being replaced_.

It didn't bear thinking about.

Was this how Lifesaver felt all the time?

Axl was… weird, and often annoying, and special, but the fact that he was just an immature kid made it better somehow. Made it ok to indulge him. She could still feel like she was worth something. She had knowledge and maturity that he didn't have.

Even if he had immunity and an ability to copy powers and attain perfection that she never would. Even if he couldn't copy X or Zero yet.

Who could?

Well, _someone _had managed to copy X's perfection, create another real android.

Zero was walking proof that it could be done. But none of them were Dr. Wily, and thank god for that. There was already enough madness in this world.

There was a towel, right: she could wrap it around her hips (at least she had hips) and just pretend that hadn't happened. Zero was good at not prying.

So she made it down to the hot spring area, where Axl was picking up loads of cut branches and jumping over the stone wall to put them in what had been designated the firewood pile. X had found a net somewhere and was getting the leaves out of the pool and putting them in bags.

"Hey, Alia!" Axl waved hello as he jumped back. She'd been the one to have him scan in a human-type configuration: the emphasis had been on figuring out how realistic he could look. He looked like a reasonable teenage male human. In very good shape, certainly, but he key word was _realistic_.

"It'll be awhile before the rest of it is clean, but that pool is fine." X pointed to the pool that had been under the porch overhang, which had protected it from falling leaves. Most people didn't realize that X had been designed to look like he was in his late teens. Reploids tended to not have the best handle on how humans aged, but people tended to either think early teens or mid-twenties.

You couldn't read the message Dr. Light had left for whoever found X, much less study his armors and realize what they implied without realizing that Dr. Light's focus, unlike that of Zero's creator, hadn't been on making X look perfect.

It had been on making him look real.

Like a real person, with real feelings, who deserved real human rights.

The fact X had been sealed away until the world would hopefully be ready to accept him. The fact that Dr. Light had left a note saying that X's body would self-destruct upon death, implying that no one should even _think _about killing his son and trying to dissect him for the technology. The fact that Dr. Light had left all those armor capsules, just in case X was still attacked.

The contrast between them was even more apparent when Zero got back, carrying more towels over his shoulder and gracefully slinging the pile down into a chair. There was a great arrogance in designing your creation to look better than any human ever could. There was a great… love in doing everything you could to make sure that your son would be safe. Could be accepted. Could, if it came down to it, _hide_.

"Can I even eat human food?" Axl asked them as Alia eased herself down into the pool.

"Well, now's a good time to find out if you can get that system to work," Zero told him. "Better here than at some diplomatic dinner."

"It's just disassembly and reassembly of matter, Axl. You'll be fine."

Alia knew that X was trying to reassure the kid, but he made it sound so easy! _Alia _couldn't handle human food. She sank down into the water, scolding herself. Every spotter back at headquarters, no, _thousands _of people would probably kill to be here, in her place. Three handsome, eligible bachelors in swimsuits.

Even if Axl was just a kid, X was practically everyone's father, and Zero was… it would be like dating a dragon, so what? Reploids were supposed to be adult the minute they were turned on, it wasn't supposed to matter… except it did.

Except she was the only reploid here. Oh, X might call himself a reploid because he wasn't the sort to give himself airs (and it ideally wouldn't matter), Axl's kind didn't have a name yet and it would be cruel to say that he couldn't call himself a reploid, that he couldn't be one of the group and Zero's real identity was this big taboo secret that no one talked about and everyone pretended no one else knew because if they knew, then someone had to come forward.

Someone would have to try to destroy Zero or, or _something_, and that wasn't right. Anyway, it wasn't like Zero was unwilling to sacrifice his life. It couldn't be that simple or he would have done it already.

…and now she was thinking about Zero killing himself, as though he was something that didn't have a right to exist because he had to be Dr. Wily's creation and the source of the virus. None of that was his fault.

Probably.

Zero wasn't a bad person.

Probably.

Now she was sounding like Lifesaver. She sighed under the water, watching bubbles float to the top. She was very intelligent, she had earned her position, she was an essential part of the organization saving the world, and compared to them she was just an ordinary person. An ordinary mortal. There but for some accident of construction went her.

Was she getting maudlin in her old age? Would Lifesaver be wondering if she was going senile next?

No, if _she _started acting oddly, the obvious culprit would be the thing that was responsible for practically all reploid insanity.

Because she wasn't immune.

And they were.

The fact that someone had built an immune… No, not an immune reploid, but _someone _immune in modern times? It should be cause for celebration. But Alia knew that she couldn't be the only person thinking 'if him, why not me? Why do I have to live with this fear?' And every reploid that was turned on from now on would know that the technology was out there, somewhere, but the world hadn't waited. It couldn't wait, when Sigma was out there, but that didn't mean it wasn't unfair. That didn't mean that children, just children, weren't going to die.

Now she was wondering if this was how _X _felt all the time.

Axl's ability to analyze and copy: did he understand how unique he was? How different from everyone else? How alone that made him, when he'd lost the person he'd clearly considered a father even though that was a human concept? Would trying to analyze X and Zero make him realize that no, they weren't just normal people either? Would he figure out exactly how strange Zero was and blab it out, inciting riots and heaven only knew what else?

Hopefully not.

He already seemed to have attached himself to X and Zero the way he'd been attached to Red Alert.

She was _jealous_, and she shouldn't be. That they'd taken Axl in so easily, added a third wheel. That they were treating him like they all were humans and this was a family outing.

She couldn't blame them. Axl was immune. She'd lost far, far too many friends and loved ones herself, and everyone knew the story of Iris. It had been the next best thing to headline news, one of the heroes in love. It hadn't hurt that Iris was one of Dr. Cain's personal creations and he'd put the time into making her photogenic.

Someone that they wouldn't have to constantly watch for the moment he'd be taken and become their enemy. Someone that could be trusted. Someone they wouldn't have to lose. She understood. That was why the entire base had been so willing, no, eager, to take Axl in. To put up with his oddities and spoil him.

It was only natural and it was irrational for her to object to being put in this safe, clean little pool while they carried on like she wasn't there. Like she wasn't a part of this. She was being overemotional like she actually was a female and had hormones to worry about. Wasn't being around handsome mainly-naked men supposed to cause hormones? It had been years since she'd read up on human biology. Reploids got lonely, everyone did, but nowadays not everyone had the system that let you do anything about it installed. It took up space, and, well… Alia was part of the last design generation where everyone had that system.

In some ways, she was privileged, she reminded herself.

The war had gone well. They had another immune person. That was _fantastic_. So what if they were no closer to a cure for the virus than when they started? So what if they were actually further away, since all the research energy was going to go into duplicating Axl instead of helping reploids?

It didn't make sense that she was feeling so down. Not on a nice night like this, when everyone was safe (for once, for now) and happy.

She was finally managing to settle down, to just enjoy the sound of wind in actual trees and the feeling of being buoyed up, just slightly, by warmth when one of her internal seals broke and part of her body got flooded.

She hadn't been designed with underwater combat in mind. Probably even her armor wouldn't have helped. It was a marvel she'd held out this long, once she thought about it. At least there were plenty of towels, and plenty of help drying off. At least nothing had shorted out and she didn't need to be rushed back to base for medical attention.

It was just a little annoying thing. One more thing that she should have worried about and they would never need to.

It was just a little thing, they didn't need to be fussing over her. Although maybe it was kind of nice. Three handsome reploids… men… _people _laying her down in a lounge chair and taking care of her. Bringing her energy drinks.

This really was a good way to spend a vacation.

Beach volleyball, now. She would probably be up to that.

Unless sand got somewhere, but there was certainly such a thing as too paranoid, as Lifesaver demonstrated.


	5. What if

_This is a birthday giftfic for Mujanai Mu, who requested either Evangelion or robots. Since I'm doing a bunch of Eva giftfics, I decided to take a break and go back to writing robots for a bit. It has been _way _too long, and I do apologize for my rustiness._

_Since they said to surprise them, while trying to come up with a premise I looked at the backlog of bunnies. _

_Post-X8: Zero, newgens, fate and fighting it. _

* * *

Good thing the space elevator hadn't self-destructed just because they killed the person who built it, Zero thought, remembering far too many maverick bases. He and X would have been fine, waiting for a way to get back down to the planet, but Axl was still unconscious.

As Zero leaned back against one of the pillars in the space elevator, he thought about what Lumine said. The evolution nonsense was nonsense, but if he was telling the truth? If Sigma really was destroyed? Maybe X wouldn't need Zero to fight anymore. Maybe X could finally have the peace he'd dreamed of. Maybe Zero's fighting would finally have accomplished something besides sating his bloodlust. Maybe he would be worthy then, he thought, watching X's back, how the gentle android cradled Axl in his arms.

That brought him back to reality. Even though Zero wished that X's dreams could come true, dreams of a world where no one else had to die, they lived in a world where even if Sigma was gone, there were still people like Lumine.

There would always be people like Lumine. Even if Zero's creator didn't build any more. X would always need him to be what he was, a weapon, and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. The peaceful world X dreamed of, the dream Zero fought for him to achieve: could Zero really become someone capable of existing there? He wanted the chance to try.

The tension in X's body wasn't just worry for Axl. He was thinking. Zero bet he knew what X was thinking about. Time to go head that off.

We. "We reploids," he'd said, not able to look at X once during that entire speech. Just a glance at Axl, lying there unconscious in X's arms, to check whether or not he'd regained consciousness.

Because none of them were reploids.

It wasn't as though he was lying. He knew that X understood not just the words he said, but the meaning behind them. So why hadn't he met X's eyes, if he wasn't lying to X?

For the same reason he couldn't say the truth straight out.

He wondered if this was what shame felt like for those with functioning empathy programming as he stared out at the stars, at the earth spread out beneath them. His internal dictionary tossed up mortification. So shame was a feeling that made someone want to die?

Yeah, that sounded about right.

'If' reploids were destined to join the scrap heap. 'When' some evolutionary step came that left them behind at some hypothetical, _future_, date.

That was how he'd phrased it, when he and X both knew that reploids had always been inferior technology. Reploids being outevolved wasn't a someday thing. They were scrap metal compared to X the android, and Zero himself. So easy to kill. Unable to come back. Sigma was inferior to X from the moment he was turned on. Just turning into Sigma and calling that evolution?

For a Wilybot, and what else could Lumine be, that was _devolution_.

Because Lumine wasn't talking about the reploid Sigma. X's first creation, a Lightbot, a Cainbot. Founder of the Irregular Hunters. The man who defeated Zero, after the red demon killed so many of his people, and brought him back alive. Gave him another chance. Lumine wouldn't have cared about that. What Lumine had been after was mastery of the virus. The mastery Zero was probably built with, and didn't want back.

Evolving into Sigma, becoming the master of the mavericks: Zero didn't see that as any improvement. For him, it would be an evolutionary step backwards. When he'd become something else, trying to become something better.

We. We reploids.

When X didn't want to be any different from his children since he wanted his children to have the same opportunities to grow and evolve he did. To be free, be themselves. When Zero was trying to become more like a reploid, when that was so much better than what he was. And Axl didn't know that he wasn't a reploid, and neither of them wanted him to know.

Oh, sure, he was a 'new generation' reploid, but what did that even mean? Humans had new generations all the time, and they were still humans. Not to mention that after meeting Lumine? Axl might be young, but he had enough taste that he'd much rather be a reploid than something like _that_.

Provided he survived. Provided Lumine hadn't done something to him that required Axl's retirement. That wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Most reploids thought that X and Zero were legends, saviors, heroes (even if that last word shouldn't ever be applied to him, needled at him more and more every time he heard it, heard the wrongness of it). So if they weren't as good as X and Zero, that was because X and Zero were themselves. Not because reploids were inferior. And Zero was supposed to just be a legendary reploid.

Axl, though? Was billed as something new. Obviously something new, while Zero could pass for a reploid since all the drastic differences weren't physical. Were hidden, many of them beyond his reach. A new generation. Meant to replace reploids. Proof, no, a reminder that reploids were outdated scrap, doomed to be killed by mavericks. Reploids had never been anything but outdated scrap.

Being stronger, having better technology, didn't make someone a better person. Didn't make them deserve to live more than someone else.

Look at Zero.

It was by giving up his capabilities, refusing to have the power Lumine craved, that he could be here. That he deserved to stand here, with X. That he _could_ stand here, and show his back to X, because X didn't need to kill Zero. And Zero wasn't going to kill him.

Zero was already fighting his own destiny. Of course he'd fight for reploids, for X's children to survive. He'd chosen that path years ago, after X and Dr. Cain repaired the Red Demon.

Axl wasn't one of X's children. He was a threat to them, like Zero himself. He hadn't liked it, leaving Axl alive after Sigma as good as told them that Axl was a Wilybot, but they needed someone else with immunity who could fight. X needed someone else, X and the people X wanted to protect. Better to take Axl under his wing, he'd decided then. Keep an eye on him, so he could deal with it if Axl intended to betray them.

He already had a lot of practice faking being a good officer who cared about his men. It was only a little more trouble to try to fake being a decent role model. Fortunately the kid had learned a lot about right and wrong from Red Alert, before the virus took him.

Just like Zero had learned a lot about fighting to protect, about looking after the reploids under your command, from General Sigma before the virus revealed that it had already taken him. Before the mask it wore began to decay. Like that gory human story about skinning someone alive and wearing their skin in order to impersonate them. As the skin disintegrated…

Lumine tried to be the false Sigma, and called that evolution. Becoming superior.

Zero tried to be the real Sigma, the one he'd only met on the battlefield as a ravening beast, and called that trying to be a good person. Trying to stop being inferior.

It wasn't X he tried to mimic, to copy as though he was the newgen here. He could never be anything like X. A reploid, broken Sigma: that was all he could aspire to be. A mimic of the lost hero who founded the hunters. A placeholder for the brave son he'd taken from X and Dr. Cain. A sword to wield in the defense of X and all reploids, since the reploid who first took up the beam saber was gone.

Perhaps finally laid to rest.

If that was true, if X would no longer have to face his son's ghost, have that memory desecrated, then Zero might even owe that little bastard Lumine. Not that he would let it stay his hand, if Lumine returned the way Zero did.

Could Axl return? X would be unhappy if he died, Zero reminded himself, and losing an immune hunter would be a massive pain in the ass. He supposed he'd gotten used to having Axl around the place, but it had been a long day and pretending to care was a lot of work. It would be nice to stop thinking for the rest of the trip back down to earth, to just stare out at the stars and the infinite, all-devouring black void between them. Peaceful.

Looking down at the earth, especially once they got closer, would lead to musing about exactly what percentage of all that damage was his fault.

A planet that was in very bad shape, but might recover, might have a future. A kid who was in the same boat, and Zero couldn't care about either of them. All he could do was remind himself that X cared. So caring for them, fighting for them: that was the right thing to do. Simple.

But there wasn't anything he could do about it now, either Axl or the planet. Nothing here that needed killing, and it was a relief to think that. When he was sharing an elevator car with the Lightbot he was destined to destroy and another creation of Wily's, one who, given Lumine, might be capable of taking control over the virus someday. It didn't take a lot of examination of the emotions attached to _that _thought for Zero to know that if he listened to his emotional programming, if he cared one zenny about ruling with the power of the virus, Axl would be just as dead as X.

Well, there was that decision made, he thought. If X wanted Axl to survive and Zero's programming didn't, then Zero's choice was clear. The only question was whether or not he could get X what he wanted. He couldn't kill whatever problem was keeping Axl asleep, and if Axl chose to betray them? Zero had tried to talk to Iris and Colonel, tried to do something other than kill them. He hadn't had a prayer, any more than X had of getting a maverick to listen. Except for Zero himself, come to think of it.

Zero was a sword. He was getting better at using words, after so many decades of practice. He was still a sword, and swords didn't have anything to do with the wounded other than sparing them or finishing them off.

_Or protecting them while they heal_, he could imagine X saying, because X was the one who thought of such things automatically. Being a good person came so easily to him, and Zero did envy him that, even if it came with so much pain.

Having a suffering circuit, feeling the pain of others… The closest Zero could come was this nebulous ache, this feeling of absence. Iris was dead. He'd held her in his arms and known that she could not return and he was the reason why, and when he screamed, it wasn't with grief. Merely frustration.

Fighting was the only thing he thought he could do back then to justify his existence, but fighting was murder if it wasn't to protect. If he couldn't protect anyone then he was nothing but a murderer. He'd held Iris in his arms (a reploid, made in imitation of X, inferior to him, scrap metal now, nothing but scrap metal, had she ever had a chance to be anything more?) and screamed for himself, that he couldn't save her, that he was nothing but a demon, fighting for no reason but to appease his bloodlust no matter how hard he tried to pretend that he could love, that he could become something better than that.

_Selfishness_. He couldn't care that she was dead. The cursed wiring of his mind wouldn't let him. He could only care that she was gone because of how it affected his own feelings, his own goals. His own ability to delude himself into thinking he wasn't a monster.

Holding Iris, he knew he was a monster. A demon. And then Sigma showed him that he was _the _devil, the one responsible for all of this. What was he fighting for? Redemption? How, when the virus was still killing X's children? Worse, forcing them to become like him? To kill each other, to kill innocent people, and _not care?_

It devastated him then, but now he was older, and wiser, and he knew to take what he could get.

Iris deserved to be cared for, missed, mourned, and if wallowing in self-pity was the only way he could feel those things at all? Then he should abuse the hell out of that loophole, and be grateful it existed. If the only person he could care about was himself, then he would remind himself how important X was to that self and his goals. If the only way he could care about X's mental state was by reminding himself that if X felt too bad, he'd have to go on vacation again and then Zero wouldn't have a moral compass on call anymore and he'd do things like fail to remember to give a damn when some kid came in with his entire family gone maverick. It wasn't until X came back and reminded him that Zero had realized that huh, right, there was something a little messed up about dragging a kid along to kill the people he loved.

In X's view of the world, it was sad that Zero was the one who had to kill Iris, but in Zero's view of the world, better him than someone else, someone who would have felt bad about it. _Much _better him than some random recruit, since with Colonel's power Iris could have killed a random recruit and then she would have felt horrible since she was enough like X to feel bad about murder. At least he'd managed to spare her that.

It was an effort to remember things like 'most people feel bad when they kill family members,' when what Zero felt about Lumine's death was general satisfaction. The punk needed killing, otherwise X wouldn't have been willing to fight him. Zero was just hoping he hadn't survived, because people who wouldn't stay dead were annoying. Perhaps that feeling was a good sign: he was a killing machine, but the idea of having an eternal supply of people to kill didn't really appeal. He'd rather the scrap stayed in the scrapheap instead of returning to bother him, and X.

He was fairly certain he shouldn't be thinking of people as scrap. Even Lumine.

Difficult.

His white-gloved hand (once again he noted what an ironic color it was, considered a redesign and decided it wasn't worth the trouble) touched the clear synthglass of the elevator wall. He could detect X behind him: the android-the reploid still hadn't moved, unless you counted small shifts to settle Axl a little more comfortably in his arms, or raising his head to look out himself.

Probably at the world spread out beneath them, knowing X. The broken and bleeding world that X wanted to protect. That he wanted to make a better place. Where people wouldn't kill each other.

In order to make that world a reality, X needed someone-no, he didn't need someone to protect him. He needed someone to be by his side, or be where he couldn't be because last creation of Dr. Light or not he couldn't be in two places at once.

That might not be true of Zero, but then his memories of what happened between his death at the Eurasia crash site and his revival in Dr. Gate's lab were fragmentary at best, and might just be dreams. Instead of what the hunters had dubbed Nightmares. He could ask X what happened when he fought the Nightmares, if any of those scenes matched what lay in Zero's memories, but that was a power of the virus, if it existed at all.

Would Axl reject his ability to change his form if he knew its origin? Knew his origin? Zero hoped not: Zero had his skill and training. He didn't need the virus to be deadly, even if it did make him stronger. Axl was a rookie. And X would be sad if he died.

Just like when Zero died.

He really shouldn't be. They were Wilybots. X was safer with them dead, Zero thought and then shook his head. He knew that wasn't true. He knew how many times he'd saved X's life. Perhaps it wasn't just wistful thinking, that X would be happier with Zero by his side. Even if it was certainly true that if only Zero had never existed, then these wars would never have happened. X would never have had to kill his children.

He wished he could take all of that burden from him. He'd tried, so X could take a break from the battlefield to study the virus, but Axl arrived and Sigma returned.

A few seconds more, and X shifted a foot, turning to the side a little so he could look at Zero, and Zero smiled to himself when his tactical systems didn't increase their assessment of the ambient threat level.

At first, he thought his body registered X as a very, very dangerous opponent because he _was_, or he had the potential to get that strong, at least. Then he'd discovered that he was Dr. Wily's creation, and X was Dr. Light's, and everything made a darker kind of sense.

But X was his friend, and X wouldn't shoot him in the back.

Well, no. X would. If he had to. But he didn't have to.

"_We still have to fight. Not only against mavericks, but against our own destiny as well_," he'd said to X.

Here and now, in this moment, he didn't want to fight. He didn't have to. And X was right (he often was): not fighting could be a victory, in and of itself. Imposing peace was opposing war. Even if it was a struggle, wasn't it Zero's destiny to fight? So how could he shrink from this battle, when it was the only one worth fighting?

"You're not _still _thinking about what Lumine said?" Zero asked. A rhetorical question: he knew X wasn't.

"I'm just glad you're alright," X said, and Zero had to chuckle.

Perhaps it was X's emotions that made him turn to verify that with his own eyes. When he had to know that Zero would come back, even if there'd never been any need to say it. "Because of Axl?"

Silence, and it was every bit as good as an instructor's reprimand. X was glad that Zero was alright because they were friends, not just because one immune hunter was down and he wanted to be sure he wasn't alone. "I hope he'll be alright," was what X said, and that took Zero a moment to decode.

Most people would be fishing for reassurance, empty platitudes, if they said something like this now. What did Zero know about medicine? And no one really understood how newgens worked. Except for their builder, and he and Zero damn sure weren't on speaking terms.

If Zero and Axl had the same 'mysterious' builder, the one Sigma called _the _doctor, then might Axl possess Zero's immortality? Could he come back the way Zero (and Sigma, and Vile, but coming back as a maverick was worse than mere death) did? Would their builder want to save him, when Axl, like Zero, fought the mavericks? X wanted to know if Zero had any guesses.

"I hope so too," Zero said with a half-shrug, because damned if he knew. "But he's never known when to quit."

When to give up. A bundle of irrepressible energy, that was Axl, and perhaps that made it even more wrong that he was so still, lying there limp in X's arms.

"I keep thinking that he's just asleep. He sleeps rather like a human," X said. Zero would have to take his word for it: he knew Axl slept a little oddly, but it wasn't like he'd stood around watching Axl sleep, much less any humans- Well, no, he'd stood watch over Dr. Cain, near the end of the human's life. Vigil, rather, either to be there for X or to be there in X's place, when X had to make arrangements. "Perhaps he'll yawn, and be upset that he missed this view."

X thought Axl would care about the _view_ after fighting Lumine? A being of his own kind, a hint about Axl's origins, nature, fate?

That was X for you. "Maybe he'll stretch when he yawns, and hit you in the eye."

X was the one who chuckled now, shifting his other foot so he was angled a little more towards Zero.

The Crimson Hunter (hah, just a more 'heroic' way of saying Red Demon) finally let his optics refocus, looking not at the distant stars (some of them were blue) but at X's faint reflection in the fake glass.

A fond smile, and Zero knew it was for him as much as Axl.

He'd wanted to tell himself that X only smiled like that because he didn't know, didn't understand what Zero was, what he'd stolen from X. He'd been deluding himself. He still didn't understand why X smiled like that. Why X saw him as someone worth admiring. Because he fought to be a good person, or at least a decent fake? How was that worth admiring, when there were so many people who weren't monsters by default?

But then, X cared about them, too. It made him happy to see others happy, other people living their own lives, and perhaps there was more to empathy than pain.

There was pain. Plenty of it. Maybe that was Sigma's, no, _his_ plan. Trying to kill his heart, if they couldn't destroy his frame? Anger, anger he could feel, and he felt it rising in him now. How dare they. If he was the one intended to kill X, then how dare anyone else try to steal that kill? No one was allowed to murder Dr. Light's creation except him. And he refused to. He wasn't going to do it, so there.

Not even if X begged him to, the way he had after Repliforce, if he ever became a maverick?

No. Not even then.

A soft groan, not a yawn, and Axl's head turned a little, exposing the ruined crystal in his helmet to Zero's view.

Something glinted, in among the wreckage, and Zero knew he wasn't the only one who had noticed it. The color was wrong for the maverick virus, and it was just a speck, not a W like the hidden insignia in Zero's original crystal.

X was already brushing away as many of the remaining pieces of the crystal as he could without cutting his gloves, before undoing a clasp to get one of the field surgical minitools out, laying Axl down on the floor and crouching by his side, trying to pick out the spark. "I can't tell if it's a foreign substance or damage to the internal light source." Something Lumine left or the opposite of some dead pixels.

Now, Axl's arm moved. "Stop poking me," he complained softly, not yet fully booted up.

"Axl," Zero said sharply. Wake up: this is your commanding officer wanting a report, _now_.

"What?" Axl asked, not even trying to sit up, and here came the yawn. It was a little hard to get Axl to properly respect his commander when his first commander was also his adoptive father, who had viewed the boy with the kind of doting incomprehension due a sweet kid who was _not_ normal. Red Alert had been a good guy before the virus got him.

Almost all of them were.

"Are you alright?" X asked him, more gently, putting a hand on Axl's shoulder.

"I feel a little dented?" Axl put a hand up to feel around his helmet

"Careful not to-" X started to say.

"Ow!" Green eyes widened, surprised.

"Cut yourself. They're sharp."

"Yeah, I noticed." Axl's hand moved as if to poke at it again, curiously. "What is that even made of? I didn't push _that _hard."

"You don't know?" X asked. Axl remade that crystal several times a day, during combat or heavy training, and he didn't know what it was made of?

"Do you know how your buster works?" Axl asked, as though it was utterly unreasonable to expect him to understand his own abilities.

Zero had to smirk when X said, "Yes." X and Dr. Cain understanding X's buster was the only reason anyone else had them.

"Oh, yeah, right, but not everyone's a scientist!"

"It's a carbon matrix," X told him. "Not quite diamond." Meaning much harder than standard helmet crystals, or even Zero's crystal. Meaning it shouldn't have been so easy for Lumine to shatter it. If he hadn't applied enough force, that tentacle should have just slid off.

Then again, Lumine was the engineer who built this space elevator. He could have analyzed the crystal composition: it wasn't as though they weren't staring out into space through a clear material a _lot _tougher than standard helmet crystals right now.

Now Axl tried to push himself to his feet, only to be met with X's hands on his shoulders when he was mostly sitting up. "Are you sure you can stand?" X asked.

"I feel fine!" Axl insisted. "Just a little dented. Let me fix that."

"No," Zero said, because that would be destroying evidence. "Leave it." If the glint was still there when they got back to base, then they could examine it and maybe Lumine had just scratched something. Maybe the tentacle had lost too momentum getting past the diamond to punch on into Axl's brain and kill him. The prototype. "If you're functional enough to get back to base, then turn your self-repair off right now."

"What, you think I should keep this?" Axl asked, turning to look at Zero. "Like my scar?"

"No," both of them said. Zero didn't understand why anyone would _want _to have imperfections, leave in weak points like that. If you advertised that you could be damaged, enemies would try to take advantage of their weakness. Axl seemed to think the scar was cool or intimidating, when it had exactly the opposite effect.

X just hated to see people injured and hurting. His first involvement with the Irregular Hunters was as a medic, fixing up the irregulars they brought in and the hunters who got banged up trying to capture them. Zero was sure that even after he'd had all this time to get used to it, X's hands still itched sometimes when he saw Axl's scar, from the compulsive urge to repair it. To fix up the kid, make sure he was okay. Hand him a lollipop, for all Zero knew.

The commander of the Seventeenth, an android built to become and do whatever he wanted might respect Axl's right to look the way he wanted to look, but there was a reason besides Zero wanting to keep an eye on Axl that Axl was in the Zeroth instead of the Seventeenth.

A newbuilt (if not quite so new, anymore) with a scar, while X was standing there, looking out at all the newbuilts of his unit? A reminder that they were going to get injured, going to die?

Well, Axl seemed to be either himself or doing a good job faking it, so Zero turned away (inviting attack, but better him than X) while X told Axl to hold still and fussed over him, trying to tap into Axl's diagnostics.

Maybe it was just an attempt to kill Axl. The prototype of Lumine's own kind. Instead of X, the father of an outdated race? The last creation of Dr. Light, and he and X both knew that was what this was about, no wonder what Lumine had deluded himself into believing. There wasn't really any point in speculating: X was the one who tried to understand people and why they did what they did. Zero stuck to tactical analysis: why people did certain things in combat was important and straightforward, but why people started fighting generally came down to the maverick virus (Sigma), stupid ego (Lumine) or high-minded reasons (X) and other emotions he wasn't equipped to understand.

X had the opposite problem, come to think of it: he had trouble processing that people really could allow stupid ego, mindless obedience to authority, propaganda or grudges to make them want to hurt people.

"What are you fussing over me for?" Axl demanded, somewhere between petulance and actual worry. Either X was being a mother hen when Axl _wasn't _weak, or X had some reason to be worried and wasn't telling Axl, which was just wrong.

"Falling unconscious just from being hit on the head is odd, Axl."

Falling unconscious from a blow to the head that shattered the helmet crystal.

The same blow that felled the Red Demon. The blow that caused the virus to infect Sigma. Zero felt like an idiot for not making the connection before, but that was why X was the brains of the outfit. Zero fell, and Sigma was chosen to spread the virus. Lumine defeated Sigma, claimed he'd made it stick and took his place, and then, when they fought him, this? It could be a coincidence.

"Axl?" X asked, a trace of suspicion in his voice. Was there something Axl wasn't telling him?

"…Sometimes it just happens?" Axl said. "I just fell down after some minor surface damage a few of the first times I went into the field fighting mavericks. That's what the scar is from: one of them thought I looked too human and thought it might be fun to cut me up before he killed me, but Red stopped them. He said I could keep it as a reminder to really try not to let that happen again." Even if it made Axl happy, that Red had saved him. "It only happened three times, well, four counting this one."

"And you didn't tell anyone at the hunters about this." There went X's disapproving voice.

"Well, it hadn't happened in months! And then Zero might not have let me come," not true: Zero had let him come knowing full well that the kid would probably get himself killed or infected. Just like any other hunter Zero could have taken along, except X. "And I didn't want you guys to worry."

"You didn't want us to assign you to only partnered missions," X corrected him. "Or small groups." Because what if they sent Axl out with a maverick who had only recently been infected, too recently for it to show up on the scans but with the virus deep enough into him for it to play on his natural envy of the immune hunters? "Axl, you're immune." We can't afford to lose you. The world can't afford to lose you.

"Well, it's not like I'd be any help stuck back at base," Axl argued.

"Actually, if you studied," X started to say contemplatively. Everyone knew that it was a miracle that Signas was still alive, the last of Dr. Cain's personal creations except Sigma. Who didn't count. If there was someone else at base with the authorization codes and various things, he would be less of a priority target. Not that X was seriously suggesting sticking Axl with a desk job, but Axl didn't need to know that.

At Axl's wordless, alarmed protest, Zero stepped in. On cue. "Hide _anything _like that again, and I won't want you in my unit."

"Aww, come on, Zero! I was just trying to make you let me help!"

"How it is _helping_ to hold something like this back when people are depending on you? What if this happened to you while you were leading rookies on a mission, instead of with the two of us here?" Zero shook his head sternly. "Don't make excuses, Axl." It would only make the two of them respect, and trust, him less. "If you don't make it clear that you understand that you fucked up, and how, then you will clearly have not learned your lesson, and we'll have to assume you'll just make the same _rookie _mistake again."

"If you don't tell us these things, then we'll have to assume that you're not telling us the whole truth. We'll _have _to worry about you, if we don't know when something you've hidden from us might put you in danger." X closed his own green eyes for a moment, then opened them. "Is there anything else, Axl? If you tell us now, then we'll take it as a sign that you know better than to hold back important information. If you don't, and we find out later…"

"I really can't think of anything!" Axl said, a little frightened. "I'd mostly forgotten about this!" It wasn't something that was really important to him. Something that could leave him a sitting duck for the mavericks, and it wasn't important to Axl, not compared to the missions and fighting the mavericks.

"Well, _try_," X told him, but finally pulled his hand back and let Axl sit up the rest of the way, bending his legs under him into a configuration that couldn't possibly have worked with the old, bulkier, lower leg armor design. "You're important to us, Axl. Important to everyone."

Axl grinned, such a boyish, happy expression, and that scar jumped out at Zero the way it had to jump out at X. A proof, engraved on his body, that someone else cared what happened to him.

Huh.

If someone else cared about you, and you cared back, then that was obviously a weakness, a weak point, because attacking the person you cared about could hurt you. By depriving you of a valuable resource. Of someone who would put themselves in danger to save you.

Was that scar a reminder to Axl that someone wanted him to live? Even if that person was gone now?

Zero knew that he should be feeling… something about this. All he could do was try to push his mind against that empty space, feel around the edges of it. What _could _go there?

Respect, he decided. For Red Alert. He must have been a good reploid, although Zero had already known _that_. The desire to protect Axl, because it was what someone worth fighting for wanted, and they weren't here to do it anymore.

Zero was sure he'd feel more than that if he was normal. Mourning, that was an obvious one. Sympathy, sadness for Axl, that he'd lost someone like that.

Maybe, maybe someday. But respect and the desire to protect this kid were what he _could _feel, so he'd go with that. Especially since they wouldn't impede his performance.

He'd wanted to protect Iris, and now all he had left where those feelings used to be was another empty ache. A void, a warning, never to even try to feel those things again, the things he'd tried to feel for her, the feelings of hers he'd wished he could return. If he had to kill Axl, too, what then?

If he lost X, X, who was threaded through his entire life as himself, as Zero? X, who tried so hard to figure out what was right, hard enough that Zero could always trust his judgment, even if sometimes, the world meant he had to go ahead and do the wrong thing anyway, for the sake of the people worth fighting for?

His guiding light. Someone worth fighting for in this corrupt and dying world. Someone who made this world a better place, worth living in. Someone Zero would die for in a heartbeat, even, especially permanently. Someone who cared about what happened to Axl, even knowing he was a Wilybot, built to bring ruin and destruction to X and his children. Everything Zero could never aspire to be, everything worth fighting for, everything he wished to protect, to keep near him. Respect, admiration, covetousness, the desire to be by this person's side, to have this person by his side, at his back.

In the blue earthlight, scattered from the sea and sky beneath them, Zero would have liked to tell himself that he would love X, if only a being like himself was capable of that emotion. He'd told himself that if he kept working at it, he would love Iris. He'd _wanted _to love her. She'd wanted to make him happy, and if only she could, if only her happiness could make him happy in turn. She'd offered him a dream, a dream that he could be an ordinary reploid in love, a dream that he could be normal.

Iris saw in him a normal person. X saw him as someone extraordinary. Someone worth everything that had happened, and Zero longed to prove him right.

The strength it took to fuss over Axl now, to care about him so honestly. When X and Zero might have to kill him. When X might get his heart broken again. It was beautiful, even though it made Zero want to throw Axl off the elevator, because if he died and Zero's X was damaged?

_Mine_. That emotion he could feel, even if he had no right to think of X that way. To want X to be his alone, when X had a heart great enough to care about the entire world. And if X wasn't that way? If he'd cared about Zero more than the world? If he was willing to leave the world behind?

That was the difference between X and Iris. It was the moment he'd realized she'd turned her back on the world that Zero knew that he would never, ever, be able to return her feelings. She'd died in his arms, at the hands of someone who didn't, couldn't care, and that meant he didn't deserve her feelings.

No more than he deserved the admiration of Axl or any other of the hundreds of rookies that passed through his hands. X among them.

But maybe, if Sigma was dead, if Zero could stop fighting, if he could turn himself in so they could study him, study the virus, find a way to stop his creator's vengeful ghost, then maybe, maybe…

Maybe he could find a way to just be happy, that Axl was alive. Find a way to grasp the emotion old hatred fought so hard to keep just out of his reach, the emotion he could only see reflected in X's eyes.

* * *

_Mmm. Not sure how well this fits into the oneshot series, but that's to be expected since I took so much of a break from it. Once again, a 1000-word giftfic exploded into something huge. I hope Mujanai Mu likes it, and Zero fans as well? I'm fond of xenofiction, and how someone can be a good person without compassion is a really fascinating and admirable thing._


	6. What may not be

_Because I have no control over what I write._

_At least there's actually an unconscious blond(e) this time?_

_X Command Mission: Axl, mavericks, precious things & holding on to them. _

_This relies a bit on knowledge of game details, especially Command Mission, which a lot of people seem to ignore. I originally had notes on that and some artbook info in the ANs here, for people who hadn't played Command Mission or read the Megaman Zero Complete Works (published in the US by UDON Comics, which also publishes the Megaman Megamix manga, _read it), _but a reviewer commented that providing context for certain things revealed that those things would come up in the fic and ruined some of the impact, so I moved them to the end._

* * *

X was here because his unit was currently off-duty, except for the officers. After all the casualties the Seventeenth had suffered in the confusion surrounding Redips' defection, they'd been taken off the patrol and garrison rotation until all the paperwork for the new members got done and X got them trained up.

Or another war happened, whichever.

X had commented three days ago, more than a little wryly, that at least this time he didn't have to spend this downtime discovering which half of the survivors had gone maverick: he could be relatively sure of how many positions he had to fill, and the damage had been done.

It was kind of sad that what worked out to friendly fire was so much less bad than a real maverick war, but X and Zero had seen this before, like practically everything else.

He'd had to get X to tell him about Repliforce. He'd done that not long after he joined, because it was… Well, Red. He'd asked Zero first, of course, because Zero's explanations of things were generally a lot shorter and easier to understand than X's, but Zero had told him to go ask X. He'd realized pretty quick, even back then, that that was weird, 'cause X didn't like to talk about the wars. He _would_, if Axl needed to know something, but he didn't like to. So normally Zero did that for him, the way X was generally the one to explain the whys of stuff like manners, and, well, everything else. Zero was fast enough to tell him what to do, or to stop doing something, but unless the reason was, 'because it gets people killed,' if he wanted to know why some rule was there (so he could decide whether to obey it or not when Zero wasn't looking), he had to ask X.

He'd found out that Zero didn't like to talk about Repliforce because he'd had to kill his girlfriend.

To be honest, Axl had ended up with the impression that Iris was kind of a waste of space to begin with. For one thing, X was nice-with-a-capital-n, so Axl knew that whenever he got his description of someone from X, he had to compensate for the fact that X wouldn't say the bad things about them unless they were important, and even then he'd just kind of indicate that maybe someone wasn't all that good in a particular area when the truth was they sucked. X would always find something nice to say, so it was a matter of _what _he'd found nice to say.

If Iris was sweet and kind, then why had she made Zero kill her? And why hadn't she been willing to fight mavericks? X had said she didn't want to hurt people, but _X _didn't want to hurt people, and he'd still fought. So she'd probably just been a coward that tricked Zero into looking after her, and then she'd repaid him like that? What a jerk.

Red hadn't talked about it much, but they'd all known that he used to be a member of Repliforce. Since that was why Red Alert was as good as it was, since Red had training that wasn't hunter standard, but it also meant that joining up was kind of dangerous, in case the Hunters got suspicious that Red was gathering an army to get revenge or something.

Red had left Repliforce because it had been obvious that something was very, very wrong. Everybody had gone nuts, so he'd thought it had to be the virus and headed for Hunter HQ before _he _got infected, which was why he hadn't been up on Final Weapon. After everything got sorted out, he'd been honorably discharged and stuff, since even if he'd totally made the right call, a soldier just up and leaving like that if they thought the orders were insane was bad for discipline.

So if Red had left, then why hadn't Iris left? Obviously she couldn't have been anywhere near as great as Red had been. That was what he'd thought then. Now?

Everybody knew that the virus went after organized reploids with weaponry, so…

It was kind of, if they fought the virus, they were in danger of getting infected, or dying, but if they didn't fight, they were in danger _anyway_, so the way that maybe eventually led to _not _being in danger, someday, was obviously better. That was what everyone in Red Alert had thought.

Everyone had _known _that the organization could end up infected someday. That they had to watch each other, and leave and tell the Hunters if it came to it. They'd all known that. They hadn't wanted to go maverick, and they'd wanted to stop the others if that happened.

But Axl was the only one who'd been able to do that. Able to get out of there. Able to see that something was wrong with _Red_ and _leave them behind_. Everyone else hadn't wanted to see it because they'd cared about each other.

He'd wondered, afterwards. If maybe he'd never cared about Red, or anyone else, at all. If he deserved to live when everyone else was dead, when he'd only survived because he hadn't cared about them. Hadn't been attached. Hadn't cared enough to want to believe in them, even Red.

Like Iris hadn't cared enough about Zero to trust that he wouldn't have killed them if he hadn't had to.

X was here because he could do not-really-classified paperwork on his tablet from any secured area, and this was a secured area. He was really here specifically just to be here.

Zero was here to kill Marino and Cinnamon.

He hadn't said that, but he wasn't even pretending to be here for any other reason, leaning against the wall like that. X had looked up at him a few times, with that specific look that was X-and-Zero-language for, "Can't you at least pretend to be doing something?" The one Zero got when he leaned against the wall and replied to people in monosyllables until they went away at official functions.

Zero generally ignored it then, too, until X resolved the situation by getting a plate of food and a drink or nudging Zero to get it for him and forcing Zero to hold them for him, so it looked like he was eating, at least. Zero didn't really see the point of human food, especially when there were humans that actually needed it, but he'd do it without complaint.

Right now, though, the only thing on hand was X's paperwork tablet, and if X forced Zero to do his paperwork for him, then _X _wouldn't have had anything to do, which would have ended up with X talking to break the silence again, or trying to be reassuring, and he'd already said everything that he could say.

Not to mention that Axl didn't want to talk about it.

So X had to put up with doing his own paperwork while Zero stood there _not helping_.

Axl didn't mind that, really, because Zero was here for one reason and one reason only, and he'd really rather Zero didn't do anything, thanks.

Because Zero was here to kill Marino, or Cinnamon, or both, if they went maverick, so that Axl didn't have to. He hadn't said he'd make it quick, but this was Zero: that went without saying.

Actually, if it weren't for the fact X didn't have any games installed on his tablet at _all_, Axl would have offered to do X's paperwork, just to have something to do besides look at the various lights and listen to beeping things and worry every time any of them changed that this was _the _change.

He couldn't talk to Marino or Cinnamon because they were asleep. That was supposed to make it go faster. He wanted to protest that he didn't _want _it to go faster, but…

He couldn't leave the room, the way he'd left Red, both because he wanted to stay this time, for them, and because the last time he'd left, because Zero had ordered him to go do some second-in-command stuff, X and Zero had been arguing when he got back. He thought Zero had ordered him to go not to give him a break, but because Zero hadn't been able to keep it in anymore and he hadn't wanted to say that stuff in front of Axl.

They disagreed lots, but this was the second time he'd seen Zero… It wasn't even that he was _angry_. Axl thought he'd gotten to understand What Zero's Problem Was a lot better now that he had Marino and Cinnamon, but he still didn't get everything that was up with Zero, and X, and when Zero was like this it kind of scared him. That same kind of 'this isn't right' sinking feeling he'd gotten when Red and everyone started acting _wrong_. The same kind of 'I might lose everything' he'd felt when Marino had made her report.

The last time Zero had gotten like this, he'd _left_. Just _left _X behind in Giga City, even though X was in danger. _Because _Zero knew X had put himself in danger, and Zero couldn't deal with it.

"I knew this would happen," Axl had heard when he got back to Medical. The intercom was open between the waiting room and the main area, just in case. Even though X and Zero were there. Surprised by the tone, he'd stopped to listen, leaning forward over the monitoring Lifesaver drone's shoulder.

"Zero," X had said, in that way that meant, "We've had this conversation before and I _don't _want to have it again."

"I _knew _it," Zero repeated.

"Zero, you're not going to convince me that you knew 'this' would happen when 'this' hasn't even happened yet. Marino turned the two of them in and Cinnamon is resistant."

"Turning yourself in isn't a good sign anymore and you know it, X." Zero was pacing. "First some idiot added it to the list of good signs, so mavericks did it to be tricky, and now the virus has degraded to the point there's a window before the immediate priorities, like not getting themselves killed or killing themselves, get put in place."

Axl had seen that window firsthand just last week, actually. One of the older reploids in the unit had run into a clump, and… Zero had been really unsurprised. "He was waiting for an excuse," he told Axl, later, when Axl wondered why Zero had already gotten a memorial notice typed up. "Some of them, they lose too many people."

"If you thought he was going to kill himself, shouldn't you have put him on leave or something?" Axl had asked. X had explained how that worked to him. It wasn't good to have someone who might snap on active duty, they'd get mistaken for mavericks and cause a panic in the field.

Zero had just looked at him in that 'you're an idiot' way that was much, _much _less annoying than the way X would sigh, and look sad that something X thought everyone should know wasn't general knowledge, and try to find small words. "I'm not that cruel."

"We shouldn't have let him keep them," Zero said as Axl watched the screen, and Axl started to get a little angry. Who did Zero think he was?

Well, alright, he was _Zero_, which meant a hell of a lot to most people, but still.

"They volunteered." At least X wasn't impressed by that.

"And we could have put them in a different unit at a satellite HQ," Zero said, as though he had any authority over who was posted where. Well, with Redips gone now, for all practical purposes he probably did, unless X put his foot down.

"Their skills…"

"I know, I know. They were good reploids." That belonged in Unit Zero.

"Are," X corrected him, still working.

"For now." Zero shook his head, hair wagging like a dog's tail, except Zero wasn't happy. Were there any animals that moved their tails when they were angry? Axl had only seen a dog because of X.

"…For now," X had acknowledged. "And, maybe... The virus is decaying."

"And that's only making it more dangerous." Mavericks weren't as obvious anymore. The latency period, the time between when they were infectious and when it became obvious they were mavericks, was longer.

"In some ways." Once again, X had to concede Zero's point. "The damage it's done to human and reploid relations is almost more dangerous right now."

"And the…" Zero searched for a word.

There was Redips, but the one Axl really hated was Lumine. How could anyone _spread _the virus, knowing what it did? That it… The virus was _disgusting_. Anyone who could keep it in his systems, knowing what it was, was just sick.

"Mavericks," X said, and there was a cold, hard note in his voice Axl had rarely heard before.

"Redips wasn't infected," Zero pointed out, also surprised. "Why _did_ you call him that, anyway?"

When Redips had revealed himself, X had been so angry he'd almost been struck dumb for the first time since Axl had known him. Anyone else would have gone right to curse words, but X thought they were overused and juvenile: he'd never use them for something this serious. "You, you…" he'd said, trying to find a word vile enough to put a name to what Redips was, before settling on, "Maverick." Since X killed mavericks, he might as well have said, "You are _dead,"_ but this was X.

"He was insane. He wanted to kill innocent people to bring about his mad vision of the world. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his systems, at least not when he put this in motion. Dynamo, Dynamo might have been irregular," X said thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling. "or at least irrational, but even if Redips didn't become like that because of the virus, he was still as, as _evil _as any maverick ever was." X had looked directly at Zero then. "The virus isn't the root of all evil."

There was enough of a slightly out of place feeling to that sentence, a bit of extra significance, that Axl knew it meant something in X-and-Zero-language, but he didn't know what.

The way Zero sort of turned away a bit was Zero-and-X-language for, "I don't want to have this conversation now, or ever." He quipped, "I've heard it's either zenny or female models," before hurrying back to the original topic. "If they're clean, we're reassigning them."

"Zero," X said evenly as Axl clenched his fists.

"They're targets!"

"Zero," X said, with a bit of a bite. Axl had never heard him use that tone before, with anyone, but he knew it was the X-and-Zero-language version of Zero's "Do not attempt to feed me this bullshit or I will bite your arm off," glare.

"I know they'll be targets anywhere they go, since everyone knows he's cares about them, but, if we send them away…"

"Then if Axl ever sees them again, it will be Red Alert all over again." Dead or maverick.

"But he won't care as much!"

X didn't have enough time to compose a reply to that (Axl wondered if he had started counting backwards from ten) before Zero spoke again: "Don't you dare tell me I'm overreacting because this reminds me of Iris. I'm the one that's been through this, I'm the one that knows what he's talking about…" Zero was facing the camera: that 'Oh crap,' look on his face cooled Axl's temper a little.

"And you think I didn't care about Sigma?" X asked, almost sweetly.

"That…"

"I could go on," X continued. "After all, I get attached to people much more easily than you do, don't I? That's why you didn't like that either of us was working with those people in Giga City: you were worried about _me _getting attached, getting hurt, not _you_." Wait, was X being _sarcastic_?

Zero, who almost never got attached to people, had… decided that Spider was someone worth respecting, that was how X had put it. Because of how Spider had felt about his dead partner, as well as what he'd said about why he took that shot for Zero, who didn't want anything to do with him. And they didn't have any idea at what point Redips had overwhelmed Spider's personality. Or perhaps it was Spider that was the original, that had been the evil one all along, and Redips had been a good person, a good commander, until his personality was overwritten. Signas was so effective because he'd spent some time as a private investigator, after all. Maybe whoever had sent them Redips & created Spider had wanted the immune commander to be equally capable.

Axl didn't know if he was capable of that or not. He was the 'flawed prototype,' anyway. He didn't _want _to know, and if it weren't for X's help he wouldn't have been able to keep them from experimenting with that. For all he knew, there was a copy with his data in whatever lab he'd been created in, and he'd get shot someday and wake up there.

If he could have nightmares the way Zero did, that'd give him some.

Maybe Redips was even the copy, and he'd had them grab Spider after he'd almost gotten killed that time and used that opportunity to destroy the original personality, since if that was the only way to save himself?

It was creepy, and Axl didn't want to think about it, in case he started thinking that Redips had a point when Redips had been a crazy, psycho… Yeah, like a maverick, except the virus wasn't someone's fault. This was.

Thinking that maybe calling Redips a maverick was an insult to mavericks made his head hurt.

"I care about people, and that's why I get attached to them. You don't care the way most do: you get attached if you respect them. Axl cares, deeply, and he respects, even if he doesn't place much stock in formality, but he doesn't get attached," X said, and Axl had almost had to take a step back in shock. "That's why he was able to do what Red asked him to, and run. That's why he'll be able to do what Marino and Cinnamon would want, and go on."

"I'm just… Axl doesn't have a lot of… You shouldn't have kept him with them!" Zero tried to get his mental feet back under him. "Two female models, one his mental age and one with a thing for…"

"Zero, keep implying that Marino is into children, and _I'll _make sure you're properly punished." X tapped something on the screen. "We can't have them getting in trouble for shooting at their commanding officer, after all."

"You know what I mean, you look like jailbait too," Zero grumbled. "And stop changing the subject, dammit!"

"If you stopped making ridiculous arguments, I wouldn't have to counter them."

"They're going to die and he's going to…"

"Zero, stop projecting." X tilted his head, wondering something. "Is this reminding you of yourself? First Sigma, than Iris: first Red Alert, and someday these two?"

Zero clearly wanted to tell X to stop psychoanalyzing him when he was trying to make a point, but he knew X too well to try. Especially since he'd get bogged down in that argument when he was trying to make a point, dammit. "…You're the one that said that if Axl stopped wanting to live, he might just fall apart."

"Zero, not everyone is as suicidal you are." X added, "Thank goodness."

"He loves them, and..."

"He's only known them a few weeks, Zero. He likes them a lot, but love?" X looked back up at Zero. "Of course, you fall in love that fast." X had his poor Zero expression on.

"Stop acting like it doesn't hurt you!" Zero loomed over X, finally angry. "Do you think I like watching you do this to yourself? You keep doing it! You gathered up a bunch of people that were all going to snap or go maverick, you think I wanted to watch that train wreck? You think I wanted to watch you pretend to be okay afterwards? You keep doing this to me! And now he's doing it too, and I don't like it, alright, there are you happy? Don't get attached, I tell him…"

"He needs a chance to make friends, Zero…"

"No, he doesn't, he needs to make it through this alive!" Zero grabbed X's tablet and threw it at the observation window so that X didn't have any choice but to look at him. "He doesn't get attached," he quoted X mockingly. "He thinks about Red, and he blames himself, so much for not getting _attached_."

"And you don't want the two of us to be hurt, even though we both know Dr. Cain's attempt to install a suffering circuit to enable you to possess empathy…" X had looked up at the camera. "Lifesaver? Shut down the non-medical monitors."

"Shutting them down," the drone had acknowledged, sounding almost as frustrated as Axl felt under the discipline.

Axl had tried to get into the room, but X must have locked it. The soundproofing was good, of course.

He'd had to wait there, not knowing what was happening to any of them, until X had finally opened the door, smiled, apologized, claimed that he'd had classified work to discuss with Zero but he should have done it elsewhere and let him in.

X had returned to sitting on his chair with his tablet, and Zero acted as though he'd never moved from the wall, watching the two in their capsules, waiting to kill them so that Axl wouldn't have to.

Zero really didn't have to. Axl could kill Marino and Cinnamon. He'd, he'd even taken Red Alert's copy data, hadn't he? To stop Sigma, to…

Cinnamon and Marino were right there, but he didn't know if he'd ever get them back. They felt so far away, and it felt like Zero was far away, somehow. Like he might leave, the way he had in Giga City. Axl didn't want any of them to leave. He liked them. They might have to leave him someday, or he might have to leave them, but he didn't want them to.

Marino might wander off at any time, and she'd let him be in this sort of relationship with her, and ended up joining the hunters, meaning she sort of had to stick around, because he was honestly okay with that. He didn't get attached, that was part of what made his kind immune, and maybe that was why the others had all gone maverick. They didn't have any people that were precious to them. They didn't understand what it was like to lose somebody. That a world with Red in it was much better than the world he'd had before he'd found Red, and X and Zero made things better too, and Marino and Cinnamon made him happier than he was without them. Inferior, superior? All of that was _bullshit_, X was right, there were just _people_, and…

He leaned his forehead against the glass, and all of a sudden X's hand was on his shoulder. "It won't be long."

"In the old days, they would have had to be killed right away. Things have gotten better," Zero said, and it might have been more of a comfort if he wasn't pretty sure that Zero actually hoped that he'd get to kill them now, on some level. Kill them now and get them over with.

He was actually almost certain that something was wrong with Zero. Actually _wrong_-wrong, not what X had said, about how all of them were immune because they were weird, with atypical designs, and Zero was an irregular but he'd been fixed. He wondered if X would find out he'd heard that about the circuit? He certainly would if Axl tried to ask someone in medical what that meant. There wasn't anything in the encyclopedia in medical, he'd checked while he was waiting for them to open up. That meant it was something old and classified, the way X's systems were. Well, so were his details. They were immune and that was important.

It wasn't just Zero, X had also sounded him out to make sure that he knew Marino and Cinnamon could die, although he'd just thought it was X being way overprotective at the time. He knew that people he loved could die. They just had to kill all the mavericks before that could happen.

Cinnamon looked peaceful, but so did Marino, even though Marino wasn't peaceful at all. He wanted her to wake up, so that he could see _her _again.

He wanted to see them again, not some sick _thing_ like Redips and Spider, like Lumine, like Red.

He wondered how many times X and Zero had sat or stood here like this. The next time, Axl would bring a tablet.

He hoped there would be a next time, because the alternative?

If he thought it would help, he would clasp his hands together and say, "Please," like Cinnamon did. If he thought it would help, he would say that he loved them, but they wouldn't even hear him. Being in capsules was supposed to speed up the incubation period, so they would know sooner, but couldn't they have stayed awake? Couldn't he have sat with them? He couldn't catch it, he was immune, and there was no way they could have talked him into helping them escape if they were maverick. If they were maverick, they wouldn't be the people he liked anymore.

Like Red hadn't been Red anymore.

He felt X gently pull him away, and he might have pulled away, pulled back to the window, if X hadn't wrapped his arms around him.

He closed his eyes, tucked his head under X's chin, and wanted the rest of the world and its viruses and its mavericks to go _away_. Everything except X, and Zero who put his hand on Axl's shoulder, and Marino and Cinnamon. And he'd like Red back, too, if he was dreaming of impossible things.

* * *

_The good news: Cinnamon and Marino aren't going to go maverick. The bad news: this is because I've decided that The Definition of a Reploid__ takes place after this._ _The ugly news: Death-by-Zero would have been much quicker. But at least they'll be happy for awhile more._

_If you think this view of Iris is unfair, you're right: Sadly, this is what inevitably happens to every historical person ever. People only remember the details that they care about, the next generation only remembers what gets talked about and the context is lost. By the time Axl joined the hunters, most people probably do think of Iris as, 'that hussy who broke Zero's heart and forced him to kill her.' It's unfair, but that's how history works. Knowledge is lost over time, and pieces of things being lost over time is a theme of this fic. By the time of Zero series, most likely no one but X remembers that Iris ever existed, not even Zero. Just like Axl himself. In fact, there's more evidence of Axl's existance than Iris' in Zero series, even though supposedly Iris is Zero series canon and Axl isn't. It's unfair, but that's history for you. _

_Interesting tidbit about Zero, although Capcom has said that it may or may not be canon - he was designed not to have empathy. Fixing his irregularity involved installing a 'suffering circuit' that would make him feel pain when others do. Or at least that's what Dr. Cain tried: even if it worked at first, I bet Zero's system would have evolved in order to render it useless after this long. _'_Suffering circuit' is actually a good term for how empathy/sympathy works. It's "I feel your pain:" feeling someone else's pain as though it is as important to you as your own. Like any circuit, it's all about the connection. And, as always, understanding how and why this works, aka enlightened self-interest, is the best. _

_In humans, there's a difference between automatic empathy, which we can only feel for 20-30 people max due to being a tribal species, and 'imagining we care,' which is what allows us to feel sad when Old Yeller dies or there's a disaster on the other side of the world. We're basically using our sentience/imagination/rationality to hack our feelings by forcing them to recognize that other people are people worthy of caring about, because our feelings are selfish, xenophobic bastards. This is why it makes me LOL when people say 'listen to your heart' as though our hearts are nicer than our heads. Um, no. When we donate to Japan, that's our heads, not our hearts. _

_The moment in Command Mission when Spider manages to impress Zero and the way Zero had no tact about Iris' dreams in X4, plus how he reacts to Sigma, X and Ciel are my framework for how this works for him. _

_Axl not possessing attachment and the other newgen stuff is a combination of my spec on X8 plus why newtypes are immune if they can be carriers without any problem, the moment in Command Mission that was my first impression of Axl and defined him for me plus a bit of the Buddhist philosophy stuff that creeps into my analysis of this universe's non-human psychology and laws of physics. I can't really go into a lot of technobabble to explain stuff when I'm dealing with Axl's POV. Everyone else I've used so far has been some variety of scientist, but Axl is, well, Axl. He's even more 'screw the philosophical ramifications and who is in the right, I'd rather skip to the part where my enemies die' than Zero is. _

_Axl/Marino/Cinnamon is a crack pairing, or technically threesome, of mine, because Axl/Cinnamon is a cute toy ship and the great theif Marino seems to like her booty regardless of model type. It also amuses me, and my Zero muse, that X is the oldest person on the planet and still looks like jailbait, since that's the age he was built to look. I think Dr. Light wanted to make sure X could pull off the innocent look, given how well Badass Adorable worked for Rock..._


End file.
